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FOUR DAYS 



AT THE 



National Republican Convention, 



ST. LOUIS, 



JUNE, 1896, ^ 

,1 



AND OTHER POLITICAL OCCASIONS. 



SPEECHES AND ADDRESSES 



OF 



Hon. Chauncey M. Depevv, LLD. 




JltiKT 189T BY BJ FALK 



PHl^TaSRAVUHE * UJlQR CO I 




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FOUR DAYS ^'33 



AT THE 



National Republican Convention, 



ST. LOUIS, 



JUNE, 1896, 



AND OTHER POLITICAL OCCASIONS. 



SPEECHES AND ADDRESSES 
OF 



Hon. Chauncey M. Depew, LLD. 



E-Uo 

.JJ3 53 



FIRST DAY. 

Address at the Banquet of the Law Alumni Association of Mis- 
souri on the evening of June 13, 1896. 



SECOND DAY. 

Address before the Merchants' Exchange, St. Louis, at noon on 
June 14, 1896. 

Address before the University Club of St. Louis on the evening Of 
June 14, 1896. 

THIRD DAY. 

Address at the Entertainment given in Convention Hall, St. Louis, 
in Aid of the Soldiers' Home of Missouri, on the evening of June 15, 
1896. 

Speech to the Ladies in the Rotunda of the Southern Hotel, St. 
Louis, on the evening of June 15, 1896. 

FOURTH DAY. 

Speech Nominating Governor Levi P. Morton for President of the 
United States at the National Republican Convention, St. Louis, on 
June 16, 1896. 

Speech at the National Republican Convention in response to the 
Motion Making the Nomination of Major McKinley Unanimous, June 

16,1896. 



AFTERMATH. 



Speech on the Issues of the Campaign to an Audience of 28,000 
people, at the Coliseum, Chicago, October 9, 1896. 



Speech delivered at the Dinner of the New England Society at 
Washington on Forefathers' Day, December 22, 1897. 

Speech upon taking the Chair as President of the Republican 
Club of the City of New York, January 17, 1898. 

Speech as President of the Republican Club of the City of New 
York at the Banquet at Delmonico's, Celebrating the Birthday of 
Abrahann Lincoln, February 12, 1898. 

Address at the Concert given at the Astoria Hotel, March 4, 1898, 
for the Benefit of the Widows and Orphans of those who perished on 
the Warship Maine. 

Speech as President of the Ennpire State Society of the Sons of the 
American Revolution at the Annual Banquet on the Anniversary of 
the Fall of Lord North's Ministry, March 19, 1898. 



Address at the Banquet of tlie Law Alumni 
Association of Missouri on tlie even- 
ing of June 13, 1896. 



Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen: 

It affords me very great pleasure to meet my 
brethren of the bar of Missouri. Though not in the 
active practice of the profession, the many and im- 
portant questions which come before me for review 
or decision keep me in constant touch and interest 

with the law. 

Our associations are as national, as broad and 
as liberal as the authority of the Constitution of the 
United States and the jurisdiction of the courts. The 
law is the only one of the professions whose mem- 
bers will both criticise themselves and accept criti- 
cisms from others with cheerfulness and equanim- 
ity. Any one who has tried it often, as I have, will 
discover a singular sensitiveness among the clergy, 
the doctors, and the journalists. No one can be 
faithful to his calling and have in it that loyal pride 
which makes for success without being jealous of its 
rights and privileges and proud of the distinction it 
confers. But it is never wise to take one's self or 
one's pursuits too seriously. All professions but 
our's resent raillery, ridicule or fun at their expense, 
or doubting suggestions of their infallibility. We, 
however, care little for the shafts of envy or of malice, 
or of sport. We submit, without response, to things 
that are said about us, and the judgments which 



6 

are pronounced upon us by lay or professional 
brethren, in the serene consciousness that clients 
must continue to contribute to our support, and that 
neither individuals nor corporations, nor munici- 
palities, nor states nor nations can get along with- 
out us. 

It was a magnificent array of noble barons and 
gallant knights who, upon prancing chargers and in 
glittering armor, gathered upon the field of Kunny- 
mede. But they could only poise their lances and 
shout their battlecries for declarations of the prin- 
ciples of liberty which had been prepared by the 
lawyers, and when the great charter had been drawn 
up by those learned in the law, these mighty nobles 
were compelled to affix their signatures by a mark 
and stamp their seals with the hilts of their swords. 

The early Puritan period has furnished to elo- 
quence and poetry a halcyon picture of Arcadian 
peacefulness. " For one hundred years," cries the 
speaker, " these communities lived with no judges to 
puzzle and no lawyers to vex them." At the risk of 
the charge of iconoclasm I must break that venerable 
image. They had courts, but they w^ere ecclesiasti- 
cal ones, and they had lawyers, but they were the 
Puritan ministers. Doubtless these learned clerics 
conscientiously and justly settled neighborhood 
disputes between individuals, but the peace of 
communities and the rights of their citizens rest upon 
broader foundations. They hung witches, they ex- 
pelled Baptists, they banished Quakers, they drove 
Roger Williams, the most enlightened man of that 
period, into exile in a wilderness, they demonstrated 
that under a theocracy, as under an oligarchy or a 



despotism, liberty can not be maintained except by 
the eternal principles of law, and a learned body of 
men to interpret and courts to enforce them. We 
will select as types of the Puritan period and the 
period of the development of the law, the Rev. Cotton 
Mather and Oliver Ellsworth, both educated for the 
ministry, both men of genius, culture and acquire- 
ments. Cotton Mather, in passing judgment and in- 
flicting sentences, created conditions which virtually 
destroyed civil and religious liberty, while Oliver 
Ellsworth, having become learned in the law and hav- 
ing adopted it as a profession, prepared the judiciary 
article of the Constitution, devised the system and 
procedure of the Supreme Court of the United States 
as it exists to-day, and in an illustrious career as its 
Chief Justice, began the formation of that body of 
law which has promoted justice and enlarged liberty 
in our country. 

We are accustomed to pay superlative tribute to 
the great soldiers of our country. Washington and 
Greene and Schuyler and Gates, of the Revolution- 
ary period, and General Scott and General Jackson 
and Commodores Decatur and Perry, of the war of 
1812, and Grant and Sherman and Sheridan, are all 
embalmed in the richest rhetoric of our history, the 
most stirring pages of the schoolbooks and the most 
glowing periods of our eloquence. In lesser measure 
we glorify the statesmen of the Republic. 

It is the story of our nation that its origin and 
development have been due to a few great leaders. 
We have little written, and less understood, of the 
large debt we owe to a few great lawyers. Alexan- 
der Hamilton was the most brilliant and construe- 



8 

tive intelligence of his own or of almost any age. 
He was the leader of the bar of the United States. 
With i^rophetie vision he saw the possibilities of the 
limitless expansion and power of this country and 
the impossibility of its development unless it became 
a nation. The Colonial statesmen were jealous of 
the rights of their colonies and unwilling to sur- 
render the autonomy of their commonwealths to a 
central government. With infinite tact, and with 
marvelous condensation of language, Hamilton cap- 
tured the assent of the discordant members of the 
young confederacy to a Constitution which created 
a Republic bound together as they thought by a rope 
of sand, but tied, as he knew, in bonds of indissolu- 
ble and indestructible union. 7 The task of inter- 
preting the delphic utterances of Hamilton into a 
lucid exposition of national power and grandeur fell 
upon that other leader of the bar of his time, Chief 
Justice Marshall. When he decided, in 1803, that 
the Supreme Court of the United States could annul 
a statute which had been passed by Congress and 
signed by the President, he prevented the possibility 
of the usurpation of power by the legislative or ex- 
ecutive branches of the government, or both com- 
bined; he safeguarded liberty, life and property 
against legislative anarchy or legislative commun- 
ism. When he decided, five years later, that the 
Supreme Court of the United States could declare 
invalid the acts of the Legislatures of the several 
states which were in conflict with the Constitution 
of the United States, he linked the states together 
by a chain of law which could only be broken by 
revolution. When, still later, he held that this same 



majestic tribunal had jurisdiction over and could 
bring before it the warring commonwealths of the 
Kepublic and render judgment upon their differ- 
ences, he made impossible organized war between 
the states. We pass down another generation and 
the conflict which Hamilton foresaw and furnished 
the broad language to cover, which Chief Justice 
Marshall gave the law to decide, of the rights of the 
states and the powers of the government, became a 
political question of the first moment. Then again 
the leader of. the bar, in a speech in the United 
States Senate, unequaled for the felicity of its dic- 
tion, the power of its logic, the sustained and lofty 
grandeur of its thought, proclaimed the doctrine of 
" liberty and union, one and inseparable, now and 
forever." This great lawyer was Daniel Webster. 
His speech w^ent into the schoolbooks, it formed the 
declamation for the coming citizens, soldiers and 
statesmen of the Eepublic and created a deathless 
and passionate love for the Union. Another genera- 
tion came upon the stage, educated and enthused by 
the eloquence of Webster, and another lawyer, 
supremely great as such, though too much in poli- 
tics to be a leader of the bar, had devolved upon him 
the supreme task of supporting the idea of Hamil- 
ton, maintaining the decisions of Marshall, carrying 
out the doctrines of Webster, and of so concentrat- 
ing the resources of the country for its defence and 
the powers of the Union for its maintenance, that he 
might hold the Kepublic together by the over- 
whelming force of arms and cement it with new and 
eternal ties by justice and forgiveness, and, " with 



10 

malice toward none and charity for all," this majes- 
tic work was performed by Abraham Lincoln. 

The great minds of other countries and of cen- 
turies preceding our Republic saw the dangers to 
liberty of the concentration of judicial authority in 
the executive or the legislature. Montesquieu 
pointed it out clearly when he said, in effect, that if 
the executive has judicial power it is tyranny, if the 
legislature has judicial power it is tyranny. To ad- 
vance the judiciary to the point where it could be 
absolutely independent of the throne and of Parlia- 
ment, of the executive and of Congress, is impossible 
in older countries. Whether it be a limited mon^ 
archy as in England, a republic as in France, or an 
autocracy as in Russia, the traditions of the throne 
will not permit the judiciary to curb its authority. 
Whether it be a Parliament as in Great Britain, a 
Senate and House of Deputies as in France, or a 
representative body, as in any of the continental 
countries, there is in them, and especially in their 
upper house, a heredity of feudal authority which 
will not brook the judge criticising its action or nul- 
lifying its laws. Fortunately for us our ancestors, 
trained and educated in the best traditions of civil 
and religious liberty, approached the problems of 
government without the heredity of monarchy or 
feudalism. They had neither classes nor privileges. 
It was possible for them to declare in principle 
and formulate in practice the idea of Montesquieu 
and the philosophical statesmen of preceding gene- 
rations. They could create the executive with its 
powers, the legislature with its authority, and make 
a written Constitution, and organize a court which 



11 

could say to congresses and to presidents, " this 
Constitution is the supreme law, and your acts must 
conform to its provisions or they will be null and 
void and of no effect." In this innovation in govern- 
ment and power of the court we have the preserva- 
tive principles of American liberty and the perpet- 
ual continuance of American opportunity. 

Every decade, almost every year, has its problems 
for solution, and its critical time. It is the mission 
of the bar, and one which it has always fulfilled, to 
forecast or to meet these dangerous situations. This 
is a lawyers' government, its Constitution was 
framed by lawyers, all but three of its Presidents 
have been lawyers, all but five of its Vice-Presidents, 
seven-tenths of its Cabinet Ministers and the 
majority of its Congressmen, Senators and members 
of its state legislatures have also been lawyers. The 
lawyer is a man of peace, but he is also a man of 
action. His courage is exhibited both in resisting 
popular clamor and in leading patriotic enthusiasm. 
He formulated the demands which led to the Revo- 
lution, and when nothing but war could secure them, 
he enlisted in the Continental army. The lawyers 
did their best to settle the controversies between the 
North and the South, but when only the bloody arbit- 
rament of arms could decide the contest, in propor- 
tion to their numbers more lawyers enlisted in the 
Union and Confederate armies than came from any 
other vocation or calling. 

The questions which the profession is especially 
to meet to-day are many, and one of them is that the 
law shall not be degraded by unworthy practition- 
ers. With all that may be said against the lawyers, 



12 

fewer of tliem are rascals, fewer defaulters, fewer 
faithless to tlieir duties, than the members of any- 
other i3rofession upon which devolve obligations 
and trusts. The weaknesses of humanity enter into 
our calling as into every other, but v/herever the pro- 
fession has been degraded it has been by the Legis- 
lature lowering the standard and admitting to the 
bar those v/ho had neither the character nor the 
learning nor the equipment to interpret the law, to 
protect the weak, to remedy wrongs or to enforce 
rights. Cheap law and cheap lawyers not only de- 
grade the profession, but they promote litigation 
and let loose a horde of incompetent and unworthy 
practitioners to prey upon the community. The 
standard of admission to the bar should be made 
higher and higher, so that those only who are wor- 
thy can be admitted. We should devote our efforts 
to the simplification of procedure. It is a standing 
disgrace to the civilization and the intelligence of 
the United States that there are more homicides in 
our country in proportion to the population than in 
any other civilized nation. It is not due, as is be- 
lieved by foreigners, to a contempt for law, to a 
want of authority in the courts or integrity in juries, 
but to the fact that obsolete and worthless rules of 
pleading and practice defeat justice. A man's life is 
more precious than the life of him who takes it. That 
the murderer should escape because there may be 
a technical flaw in his indictment throws the com- 
munity in a rage back to those first principles of 
natural justice, where, there being no law and no 
courts, the murderer was tried by his neighbors and 
upon proof was executed with no other appeal than 



13 

that which might be made to the Supreme Judge of 
the Universe. We should brush aside these techni- 
calities, which bring the law into contempt, protect 
murderers and make life cheap. When the Appel- 
late Court decides cases upon their merits, upon the 
guilt or innocence of the accused, there will be sub- 
stituted in this country for Judge Lynch the supreme 
authority of the law and its appointed or elected 
administrators. 

Lawyers can generally be trusted when they be- 
come judges. The history of our country demon- 
strates this assertion, and the history of Great Bri- 
tain, from which we derive our law, establishes this 
principle. Coke, as Attorney-General, was subser- 
vient to the Crown, but as Judge defied the King and 
sustained the sovereignty of the law. This reforma- 
tion must be brought about, not only for the peace 
of communities, not only to promote respect for the 
law, but that in foreign countries there may not be 
the universal impression that all our judges go by 
the name of Lynch. 

The domestic relation is the most sacred in a civil- 
ized community. Home is the sweetest word in the 
English language. He who assails it is an enemy 
of his country, and the statute which weakens it is 
destructive of social order and of domestic happi- 
ness. We should strive to bring about that uni- 
formity of law which would give in every state the 
same rules for divorce. We should so legislate, if 
necessary by Congress, under the provisions of the 
Constitution, that a state or territory may not, for 
temporary gain, say that the sacrament of marriage 
can be sacrificed upon a whim and vv^ithout notice. 



14 

and compel older communities, which recognize in 
their statutes the sacredness of the obligation, to 
obey this travesty upon morals and upon law. 

Steam and electricity have made possible the ac- 
cumulation of great fortunes and the formation of 
powerful combinations. The world has not adjusted 
itself to these circumstances, and sudden and violent 
disruptions of industrial conditions produce distress, 
doubt and distrust during the processes of reorgani- 
zation. It will require all the courage, patriotism 
and ability of the lawyers, in public and private life, 
during this tentative and critical period, to guard 
both against assault and encroachment upon indi- 
vidual enterprise, opportunity and liberty, and the 
delusive dangers of socialism and anarchy. 

I know of no more charming member of the com- 
munity than the old lawyer. I studied with a judge 
who, as I left his office, had completed the eighty- 
sixth year of his life, and the sixty-fifth year of his 
practice. The old lawyer is the custodian of the 
secrets of the community. If he has been true to his 
profession and to his best instincts and teachings, 
he has been the benefactor of the village, or the 
town, or the county in which he has spent his life. 
He has settled family disputes; he has reconciled 
heirs to the provisions of wills; he has adjusted satis- 
factorily to all, and to the prevention of family feuds, 
the distribution of estates; he has prevented neigh- 
borhood vendettas on boundary lines; he has 
brought old-time enmities into cordial friendships; 
he has made clients and money by being honest, 
faithful and true. The secrets of his register, of his 
safe and of his memory are the skeletons of the fam- 



15 

ily closet of the whole neighborhood. But the pro- 
cess of modern cremation does not more perfectly 
destroy the human frame than does this lawyer's 
fidelity to his oath keep out of sight these family 
skeletons. 

The law promotes longevity. It is because its dis- 
cipline improves the physical, the mental and the 
moral conditions of its practitioner. In other words 
it gives him control over himself, and a great 
philosopher has written that he who can command 
himself is greater than he who has captured a city. 
The world has been seeking for all time the secrets 
of longevity and happiness. If they can be united, 
then we return to the conditions of Methusalah and 
his compatriots. Whether I may live to their age I 
know not, but I think I have discovered the secret of 
Methusalah's happy continuance for nearly a thou- 
sand years upon this planet. 

He stayed here w^hen there was no steam and no 
electricity, no steamers upon the river or the ocean 
propelled by this mighty power, no electric light, no 
railways spanning the continent, no overhead wires 
and no cables under the ocean communicating intel- 
ligence around the world, and no trolley lines re- 
ducing the redundant population. He lived not be- 
cause he w^as free from the excitements incident to 
the age of steam and electricity, but because of the 
secret which I have discovered, and it is this: 
Longevity and happiness depend upon what you put 
in your stomach and what gets into your mind. 

My brother lawyers of Missouri, those of you who 
have been long at the bar, and those who are just 
entering upon the practice of the profession, it is 



16 

with great pleasure that I can step aside at your 
invitation, from the political excitements and the 
party passions which call me here as a delegate to 
the Republican National Convention, and meet you 
in this social communion and happy interchange of 
those fraternal greetings which lawyers can always 
extend to each other. 



Address before the Merchants' Exchange, 
St. Louis, at noon on June 14, 1896. 



Mr. President and Merchants of St. Louis: 

It is with great pleasure tliat I am here to-day to 
meet you and be greeted by you. I did not come to 
St. Louis to make a business speech — I am a busi- 
ness man on a political errand (cries of " Good " and 
laughter) — but I came because I believe it to be the 
duty of the business men of this country to take the 
government of the business of the country in hand. 
(Applause.) We have neglected our duty in that re- 
spect, and many of the evils — most of them — which 
afflict our municipalities, our States and our Con- 
gress are because the business men of the country 
have been too absorbed in their own affairs — their 
private affairs — to pay attention to public ques- 
tions which are their private affairs. (Applause.) 
This Convention which meets here to-morrow is a 
gathering of the representatives of one of the great 
parties of the country. It is fortunate for free insti- 
tutions and for their permanence that there should 
always be two great parties to watch each other, and 
when the one makes mistakes or becomes corrupt, 
the other can step into its place. 

I count it a fortunate event that the Kepublican 
National Convention is held in the city of St. Louis. 
(Applause.) It is fortunate that this party, organ- 
ized on lines which thirty-five years ago were so full 
2 



18 

of passionate resentment, is holding its quadrennial 
meeting for the nomination of its candidates and for 
the enunciation of its principles in the principal city 
of what was formerly a slave State, in the principal 
city of what was formerly a border State, in the 
midst of the territory where a generation before the 
people were at each other's throats upon the exist- 
ence of the Union. It demonstrates as nothing else 
could to the country and the world that the United 
States are now one nation and one people. (Loud 
cheers and applause.) It is fortunate, also, that 
these Conventions are held. This is a great country; 
it is a big country; it is a vast country; and the ele- 
ments of its union and prosperity will be promoted 
by having all parts become better acquainted with 
each other. The North, the East and the Northwest 
know but little of this capital of the Mississippi 
valley, and of the Mississippi valley itself. But w^e 
come here from New England, we come from the 
Middle States, we come from the Northwest, we 
come from the Pacific Coast, to carry back to our con- 
stituencies everywhere that the Mississippi valley is 
about as important a part in the business and intel- 
ligence of this great country as the sections from 
which we come ourselves. (Cheers and applause.) 
Certainly, we have all been pleased with the gener- 
ous hospitality with which you have received us. 
No community ever did so much to make the visiting 
delegations of the country happy and comfortable. 
(" Hear, hear," and applause.) There has been no 
politics in this reception. You simply wanted to 
know the men without regard to politics from all 
over the country, and that they should know you. 



1» 

No host ever did so much for guests as you have done. 
(Cries of " Good " and applause.) To clear your at- 
mosphere and to give it a temperature that New 
Yorkers envy (laughter), you get up a |10,000,000 
cyclone — and you did it well. (Bene wed laughter.) 
Now, gentlemen, I believe in the force and power 
and influence of organizations like your own all over 
the country. They are the real Legislatures; they 
are the real Congresses. There is no Board of Trade 
in the United States which in the same length of 
time could have done and failed to do what Congress 
has done and failed to do in the last six months. 
(Laughter and applause.) Whatever difl'erences of 
latitude or longitude there may be, there is no differ- 
ence of opinion upon great questions affecting the 
currency of the country between New York and St. 
Louis, and Boston and New Orleans, and Philadel- 
phia and Minneapolis, and St. Paul and San Fran- 
cisco. We know what is best for the interests of the 
country, and we wish our representatives knew as 
much. We have seen a spectacle which has had the 
most disastrous effect upon our credit and upon our 
business, of a few^ men intent upon putting their 
ideas upon nine-tenths of their fellow-citizens, hold- 
ing up the government, saying " You shall not have 
the money to pay your debts, you shall not have the 
money to run your government, you shall not have 
the revenue necessary to keep yourself solvent, you 
shall not have the resources necessary to sustain 
your credit, unless you adopt our ideas in regard to 
the currency." (" Hear! " and applause.) I am glad, 
not as a Republican, but as a business man, that that 
issue has been made, and let us settle it now and for- 



20 

ever. ("Hear! Hear! " and cheers.) I have no hesi- 
tation in saying that if to-morrow there is nominated 
and put upon a platform in the Republican Conven- 
tion a man who believes that there should be the 
free and unlimited coinage of silver, and a platform 
which so declares, that ticket could not be elected. 
(Cries of " Good! " " Hear! " Bravo! " and applause.) 
There are no party lines on a question of this kind. 
The business men of this country know, and knoAV by 
their knowledge of the laws of trade, know by the 
sad experience of the last few years, that one of the 
causes of this frightful depression which is keeping us 
in the throes of uncertainty and distrust is because 
there is a doubt as to our currency being on a par 
and in touch with the best currency of the commer- 
cial nations of the world. (" Bravo! " and applause.) 
I have no sympathy with half-and-half measures, or 
men w^ho are half men and half something else. 
(Laughter.) Let us say what we mean, and then let 
the people, knowing what we mean, decide for the 
one side or the other. I am told that the word 
" gold " is unpopular. Well, then, let us declare for 
gold and see if it is unpopular — " G-o-l-d " as the 
standard currency of the United States, until by in- 
ternational agreement with the commercial nations 
of the world we shall have some other standard. 
(Applause.) With two thousand millions of foreign 
commerce, with Liverpool affecting the price of our 
wheat and the value of our corn, VN^ith our products 
going to other nations from our factories, we can not 
be isolated from the rest of the world in that which 
tlie world calls money. Our money must be as good 
as the best, and never tainted nor doubted. (Cries 



21 

of " Good ! " and applause.) Let silver have its place, 
let paper have its place, let any token have its place 
that is redeemable on presentation at the bank in a 
gold coin of the value expressed on the face of the 
token. (Applause.) 

Now, gentlemen, I did not come here to argue the 
currency question. I came as a business man to meet 
business men, knowing that all business men have 
the same ideas on this question. And what do these 
exchanges mean? We are told that there are certain 
States wedded to other ideas. We have no hostility 
to them. I have just been through them, and they 
are to grow great and prosperous, not by one element 
of production, whether it is silver, or gold, or copper, 
or cattle, or the product of the field, but they are to 
grow great by the varied industries which make Mis- 
souri great and make New York great. 

I am delighted to meet with you here in St. Louis. 
It is many years since I had the pleasure of meeting 
you on a public occasion. I am delighted to find, in 
studying your local affairs, that you have the best 
city government, according to an authority on that 
subject. Dr. Shaw, that there is anywhere in the 
United States. (Applause.) That city government 
has come from having devolved upon your best citi- 
zens the formation of a charter for yourselves. It 
solves the problem of municipal government, that, 
leave the people of any locality to themselves, and 
intelligence and integrity will govern that munici- 
pality. (Applause.) 

Gentlemen, there are in this country about four- 
teen millions of people who are wage earners. About 
twelve millions of them are in the States that believe 



22 

that the standard of money in the United States 
should be the best, or equal to the best, in the world. 
Those twelve millions of workers want to be paid for 
100 cents' worth of work in a coin that is worth 100 
cents anywhere (applause) ; and you who are at these 
great marts, you who are studying blackboards, you 
who are listening to the ticker over on the other side 
of this room, you want that there should be no doubt 
on that question. You come here in the morning 
and you find the price of wheat in Liverpool, you find 
what is being done in the Argentine, you know what 
is being done in India, you know what is being done 
in Egypt, you know what are the carrying prices by 
land and sea, and then as merchants you form your 
calculations; but if you have to figure up at the same 
time what is the difference between the money which 
you use and the money with which you have got to 
sell or buy v/ith, there is not brains enough in this 
organization to know whether a man goes to bed sol- 
vent or bankrupt. (Applause.) 

Gentlemen, on behalf of my associates in the Con- 
vention, I thank you for the generous hospitality 
with which you have received us; I thank you for 
the facilities of every kind which you have offered to 
make our stay here comfortable and pleasant; I 
thank you that you have led us to know that if any 
National Convention for any purpose wants to find 
a first-class place in which to meet, it better come to 
St. Louis. (Cheers.) 



Address before the University Cluti of St. Louis 
on tlie evening of June 14, 1896. 



Gentlemen: 

Your invitation has been an agreeable surprise to 
the college men who are attending our National 
Republican Convention. You give us the unex- 
pected opportunity to escape, at least for an evening, 
from the maelstrom of politics. 

The delegates to our national conventions have but 
three days in which to name the candidates and for- 
mulate the principles which are to govern for four 
years this great Republic. This concentration of such 
mighty issues in so limited a time gives us the oppor- 
tunity for neither rest nor sleep. You have happily, 
for those who are university men, given the required 
relief. From the close committee rooms, the crowded 
hotel corridors, the surging masses on the streets, the 
wild excitement, the intense feelings and the fierce 
discussions of the hour, we are here once more upon 
the old college campus. It is a festal night for Alma 
Mater. The air is vocal with college songs, the trees 
are hung with Chinese lanterns and the speakers are 
met with that most inspiring of sounds, the old col- 
lege cheers. 

The colleges of the country have not escaped the 
universal tendency to association. You may call it 
monopoly or you may designate it as a trust or you 
may apply to it any other name, and yet the tendency 
of the times is for those of similar minds and pur- 



24 

suits to get together. Twenty-five years ago gradu- 
ates of the different colleges and universities knew 
but little of each other. Their meetings were of their 
own kind, and they were in touch only with the men 
of their own institutions. These university clubs 
which now exist in all the cities of the country are 
the centers of college unity and of the university 
spirit. As the Federal and Confederate soldiers 
meet together in yonder convention for the good of 
their common country, and meet again at the social 
board to talk over their old campaigns, so in these 
university clubs gather old enemies who fought their 
fights as Yale men or Harvard men, as Columbia men 
or Princeton men or the men of the fresh water col- 
leges, with the oar, with the bat, and with the ball. 
Here we lay aside our strifes of politics and our com- 
petitions of business or the professions, here we cul- 
tivate the true college spirit and form new and life- 
long college associations. 

I am specially delighted to meet here upon this 
campus of your club and under your warm Southern 
sky that grand old war governor, and gallant soldier 
of Illinois, General Oglesby. It is seldom that the 
untamed giant of the west finds himself among met- 
ropolitan conditions in what you are pleased to call 
our effete east. I am sure the governor will permit 
me to remind him of and relate to you an incident con- 
nected with one of his visits to New York. It was at 
t he banquet of the Eepublican Club; there were eight 
speakers and two hours for the addresses. The Gov- 
ernor said tc me: " Hovv^ long is a man permitted to 
calk on Republican principles at a Eepubllcaa iiu et- 
ing in New York? " " Well," said I, " how long is a 



25 

man permitted to talk on Kepublican principles 
at a Republican meeting in tlie west? " " In 
Illinois," said the Governor, " never less tlian 
three hours and frequently five." " Well," I said, 
" Governor, there are six speakers to talk after 
you; it is now half-past ten o'clock; you will be 
called about eleven, and if you talk more than fifteen 
minutes you may never return to Illinois." " Well," 
said he, " it is difficult for a man to concentrate his 
thoughts within that space, but I will try." At 
twelve o'clock the Governor was careering in the full 
tide of eloquence; at one o'clock he went back to his 
hotel with Governor Foraker, denouncing the dys- 
peptic New Yorker who could not digest a fair dose 
of the great doctrines of Eepublicanism. Foraker 
says that at four o'clock the Governor came into his 
room and said, '' Foraker, these weaklings of the east 
do not understand our western vigor and the 
strength of our western thought. Now, I will tell 
you what I intended to say." Foraker managed to 
meet me the next day at lunch. One other incident 
of the visit which also showed how little confidence 
the west places in our eastern conditions was the fol- 
lowing: Said the Governor, " Depew, where were 
you born?" I said, "Up in Peekskill, on the Hudson 
river, about forty-five miles from New York." "Where 
was your father born?" " At the same place and 
on the old farm." " And your grandfather? " " On 
the old farm." " And your great-grandfather? " 
" On the old farm? " " And your great-great-grand- 
father? " " He bought the farm of the Indians; he 
was a Huguenot; and born in France." Said the 
Governor, " I don't believe one word of it; there is 



26 

no such case in the whole State of Illinois." I be- 
lieve the first settler in Illinois went there less than 
one hundred years ago. 

We hear much of the influence which the educated 
men should exercise upon public affairs. We little 
estimate how great, how mighty, is the power of the 
graduates of our American colleges. The people of 
the east do not appreciate, and apparently cannot 
understand that in the western cities and towns are 
a larger number of university men in j)roportion to 
the population than in the older east. The univer- 
sity club flourishes and is the strongest in the coun- 
try between the Mississippi river and the Pacific 
slope. I have yet to find a municipality of any con- 
siderable population which has not extended to me 
the cordial greeting of its university men when I 
have visited the town. From the farmhouse and the 
miner's cottage, as well as from the dwelling of the 
merchant and the professional man and the palace of 
the millionaire, the youth of America are constantly 
being recruited into the under-graduate army of our 
colleges and universities. There merit alone wins 
distinction; there the conditions of the boy outside 
the college walls have no influence upon his standing 
inside the college campus. Colleges are the great 
leveling influences of the country, but they level up. 
Their standard is manhood — American manhood. 
They give to their sons that broad culture, that lib- 
eral learning and that catholic spirit which brings 
you together in this university club, which leads 
you to extend to us of all the colleges who are stran- 
gers within your gates your charming hospitality 
and which makes this night the most agreeable of 
our visit to St. Louis. 



Address at the Entertainment given in Con- 
vention Hall, St. Louis, in Aid of the 
Soldiers' Home of Missouri, on the 
evening of June 15, 1896. 



Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: 

We Americans are fond of dramatic situations. 
The first century of our national existence is the 
most wonderful and brilliant drama ever written. 
The stage has been the North American continent, 
the actors the American people and the audience the 
world. The subject of this drama is the evolution 
of liberty. Its influence upon the audience has been 
incalculable. It has promoted revolutions, over- 
turned thrones, changed the course of empires and 
uplifted distant peoples to higher civilization and 
the acquisition of greater rights. The contrast be- 
tween to-night and to-morrow is picturesque. To- 
night we devote the hour to memory and gratitude — 
to memory of the heroes dead, who fell upon the 
battlefield for their flag and country, and gratitude 
to the heroes living, who, with their departed com- 
rades, saved this republic. To-morrow the delegates 
representing one of the great parties of the country 
will meet in the effort to put before the country can- 
didates and principles, which will give to their 
organization and its measures and policy the control 
of the Government, which the men whom we honor 
to-night enabled to exist. 



28 

The characteristics of the decisive conflicts of the 
past and of the principles enunciated by the great 
minds of former generations and the wonderful ad- 
ventures of discoverers and explorers have been that 
they little understand the ultimate results of what 
they did or said. All the centuries of the Christian 
era were a preparation for the American experi- 
ment. From the crucifixion of the Saviour to the sail- 
ing of Columbus there are dreary ages of tyranny 
and suffering. The culture of antiquity, its civiliza- 
tion and its arts, were lost in the darkness of the 
middle ages. Fuedalism divided the civilized world 
into masters and slaves. The concentration of power 
in the monarch permitted the light of liberty and 
learning to glimmer here and there, amidst the 
gloom of arbitrary exactions and fierce oppression. 
The voyage of Columbus and his historic discovery 
present the picture which survives the events of the 
fifteenth century and gives to it its glory and re- 
nown. But Columbus, dreamer and seer as he was, 
neither saw nor comprehended the consequences of 
his discovery. The little band of pilgrims which 
■gathered in the cabin of the Mayflower were the 
state builders of their period. The charter which 
they drew presented the central features of Ameri- 
can liberty. Its immortal declaration that they pro- 
posed in the wilderness, where they would settle to 
form a government of just and equal laws, laid the 
foundations of our institutions. But the narrow 
bigotry with which they carried out this principle 
demonstrated that they had not yet arrived at a full 
apprehension of the broad conditions and beneficent 
workings of this mighty truth. 



29 

The Declaration of Independence, put for tlie first 
time in a bill of rights, which should be the charter 
of a nation, the academic and philosophic utterances 
of Rosseau and the philosophers of the sixteenth 
century. Its maxim, which condensed all the teach- 
ings of the past on the rights of man, was " that all 
men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their 
Creator, with certain unalienable rights, that among 
these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." 
And yet the patriots of the Continental Congress and 
the soldiers of the Continental army did not compre- 
hend the infirmity of their sublime principle with 
slavery existing in the country. For three-quarters 
of a century the American people explained and 
blushed and blushed to explain this anomaly be- 
tween the declarations and the practice of their 
charter of liberty. But when the proclamation of 
emancipation, striking the shackles from the limbs 
of the slaves and freeing the bondmen, was issued by 
Abraham Lincoln, the stain was removed from the 
parchment of Jefferson. American citizens stood 
erect in the pride of untainted liberty, and the pain- 
ful and weary march for freedom had ended in vic- 
tory. The victory had been won by the sacrifice of 
the flower of the youth of the country. Those in the 
Federal army fighting for the preservation of the 
Union, and those in the Confederate army, of the 
same race and lineage, fighting for what they be- 
lieved to be right, expiated by their sacrifice the 
crime of the century, and with their blood washed 
from the Declaration of Independence, the Constitu- 
tion of the United States and the decisions of the 
courts, the infamy of human slavery. The full fru- 



30 

ition of the aspiration of the ages and the realization 
of the hopes of mankind came at Appomattox. The 
sun of that day illuminated two thousand years of 
human progress. It made clear the perfected prin- 
ciples of the Declaration of Independence, the full 
practice of the Mayflower Charter, the living exercise 
of the rights of Magna Charta and the fulfillment in 
government of equal rights and equal opportunities 
before the law and the evolution of civilization 
towards Christ's mission, " Peace on earth -and good 
will toward men." 

Thirty years ago I delivered the address on the 
first Memorial Day in the graveyard of the old Cort- 
land town church. The sacred edifice had been Avor- 
shiped in for 150 years. The stones which marked 
the places where the rude forefathers of the hamlet 
slept, bore inscriptions to the memory of many a sol- 
dier of the Revolutionary War. Beside them were 
the new-made graves of their grandsons and great- 
grandsons, who had fallen in the battles to preserve 
the nation which they had died to found. Every one of 
the three thousand people who had gathered from the 
village and the farms were in deep mourning. There 
was a vacant place at every fireside and sorrow 
in every heart. The oration proceeded amidst 
tears and sobs, which faintly expressed the deep 
agony and love of my hearers. On Memorial Day, 
this last 30th day of May, the land was full of joy. 
It was a day of parades, excursions and festivals, of 
pleasure and happiness. The sorrows and griefs, the 
hatreds and vindictiveness of thirty years ago were 
forgotten. The men and the women, the boys and 
the girls on steamboats and on cars, in the fields and 



31 

in the woods with merry games and infectious laugh- 
ter, were the living and beautiful evidences of the 
growth, the prosperity and the beneficence of our 
freed and reunited Kepublic. Thank God for the 

change. 

A generation has come into active and controlling 
citizenship which knows nothing of the Civil War. 
Its battlefields are as distant, its events as legend- 
ary, and its heroes as impersonal to them as Bunker 
Hill and Lexington, as Washington and Lafayette. 
For them such celebrations as this are the univer- 
sities of patriotism and schools for the inculca- 
tion of the inestimable value and incalculable bless- 
ings of our national union. There is no animosity, 
there are no heart-burnings, there is no revival of 
revengeful feelings by the recital of this story. The 
son of the Confederate soldier can point with pride 
to the superb valor of his father, and rejoice with 
the son of the Union veteran, as citizens of a com- 
mon country, in the result which gives to both the 
equal and unequaled blessings of citizenship of the 
American Union. 

Soldiers' homes are not for the generals or the 
colonels, but they are the asylums w^here a grateful 
people will and must smooth the declining years of 
the private soldier. Events crowd upon each other 
so rapidly that the fame of to-day is obliterated by 
the reputation of to-morrow. With few exceptions, 
names which were as familiar thirty years ago as 
household words, are no longer known. As I go 
through the great national cemeteries, the proud 
monuments erected to the heroes who led the troops 
to victory do not impress me so much as the pile of 



32 

sombre granite which has inscribed upon it, " To the 
unknown dead." The beautiful tribute of a great 
poet to the common soldiers making a famous charge 
was : 

" Theirs not to reason wby; 
Theirs but to do and die." 

But behind every musket in the Union army was 
a thinking man. The volunteer had enlisted to fight 
for a principle and to die, if need be, to prevent the 
dissolution of the Union. He did reason why, and 
he did do and die to win by his valor the cause whose 
justice and right he so well understood. 

A few years ago in a museum at Athens I saw the 
busts and statues of the famous generals of Greece. 
They had been found in exploring the ruins of the 
ancient temples. But recently there had been dis- 
covered a slab upon which had been carved in bas- 
relief the full-sized figure of the soldier who ran the 
twenty-six miles from Marathon to Athens to carry 
the news of the victory which had saved his coun- 
try, and who, as he voiced it to his countrymen, 
dropped dead. Three thousand years have elapsed 
since the message of that soldier proclaimed to the 
world a triumph of civilization over barbarism, of 
which we to-day in distant America enjoy the fruits. 
That venerable monument lives and will continue to 
express the unselfish valor and patriotism of the 
common soldier. 

Caesar and his legions battled for the conquest of 
the world; Napoleon fought to conquer Europe, 
while Frederick the Great and Marlborough and all 
the great generals of ancient and modern times led 
their armies to buttress thrones or subdue peoples.. 



33 

The Grand Army of the Republic marched and 
fought and bled and died, not for conquest or fame, 
not for pelf or power, but to free the enslaved. Julia 
Ward Howe, in her battle hymn, expresses their 
ideas : 

" In the beauty of the lilies 

Christ was born across the sea, 
As He died to make men holy, 
Let us die to make men free." 

These early days of June are full of patriotic 
memory. Thirty-five years ago the four weeks from 
the 12th of May to the 12th of June decided the fate 
of Missouri, the future of St. Louis, and, to a large 
extent, the destiny of the Republic. The streets 
of this beautiful and prosperous capital of the Mis- 
sissippi Valley are now full of vehicles of commerce, 
crowds of prosperous people and marching clubs, 
carrying the banners of party favorites in the peace- 
ful and emulous strife for party victory. But thirty- 
five years ago the drum beats of w^ar were heard 
in this town and hostile armies were encamped upon 
the borders of St. Louis. The question w^hich any 
day might decide, which was upon every lip and 
blanching every cheek, was, "Shall Missouri cast her 
lot with the Union or join the Confederacy?" Had 
she joined the Confederacy, the war would have been 
prolonged, her territory would have been the camping 
grounds and battlefields of the Union and Confeder- 
ate armies, her farms would have been devastated, 
her industries destroyed, her cities laid waste, and 
the prosperity of St. Louis set back half a century. 
This calamity, beyond the powder of imagination to 
picture or words to describe, was prevented, Mis- 
S 



34 

souri saved and St. Louis rescued by the foresight, 
the patriotism and the indomitable courage of your 
great citizen, Frank Blair. It was fortunate that 
he should have for his right arm that gallant soldier 
and hero, Captain Lyon. It often happens in the 
story of empires that small events count for more 
in their results than the greatest battles. Captain 
Lyon's seizure of Camp Jackson will be reckoned by 
the future historian as one of the decisive conflicts 
of the Civil War. Every state preserves for the in- 
spiration of its citizens the memory of the men who 
have made it or saved it, and the Missouri trinity 
will be Frank Blair, General Lyon and General 
Sigel. 

It requires only a brief contemplation of Ameri- 
can battlefields to illustrate the madness or the 
idiocy of the statesmen who would frighten us by 
the dangers which they claim threaten our security 
or peace from foreign assault or foreign invasion. 
Thirty thousand American soldiers conquered Mexico, 
with twelve millions of inhabitants. It was American 
bravery, intelligence and dash. Three millions of 
people threw off the yoke of the British Government, 
though England was mistress of the seas and the 
arbiter of Europe. Hooker's men stormed the almost 
impregnable heights of Lookout Mountain, and 
won a victory above the clouds, while Pickett's 
brigade of the Confederate army hurled themselves 
with unavailing valor upon the breastworks and 
died under the murderous fire of the batteries of 
Meade at Gettysburg. There are in the United 
States to-day a reserve of ten millions of fighting men. 
They are the same stock, with the same bravery and 



35 

the same unconquerable spirit as those who fought 
from Bunker Hill to Yorktown, who won the victory 
under Jackson at New Orleans, who followed Scott 
and Taylor into Mexico, and stormed the heights of 
Chapultepec, and marched triumphantly into the 
city of the Montezumas. They are of the same stock 
and spirit, the same courage and fearlessness of 
death as the soldiers who won the admiration of 
the French and English officers on the staffs of 
General Grant and General Lee in those con- 
flicts of the Civil War, where five hundred thou- 
sand men died in battle. Those soldiers require 
no standing army for their safety, no expensive, 
exhausting and threatening militarism for the 
salvation or the defense of their country. They 
will take care of that themselves. It is for us 
to preserve the glorious heritage for which these 
men died or were wounded, or are now maimed and 
helpless in our midst. Our duty is to care tenderly 
and piously for the survivors of the grand army, and 
to carry out in policy, in principle and in practice 
the ideas for which they fought. Their triumph 
gave to the Republic the new South. It substituted 
for the old oligarchy and slavery the superb develop- 
ment which comes with individual enterprise and 
free labor. The new South is redeeming its wilder- 
nesses for population and homes; it is reclaiming its 
waste lands for the varied productions of its fruc- 
tifying climate. It is bringing out the exhaustless 
treasures of its mountains and hills; it is establish- 
ing manufactories, founding cities and adding its 
quota to the majesty, the power and the greatness 
of the United States. We must be true and faithful 



36 

in safeguarding the ballot-box and the right of the 
citizen to deposit his vote and have it honestly re- 
corded. We must be courageous in fighting the mad- 
ness of the hour or the errors which increase with 
business depression and hard times, and go with our 
party into temporary defeat, if need be, for the pre- 
servation of the national credit, and those principles 
of sound finance and practice common with the com- 
mercial nations of the world, and which alone can 
keep us solvent, prosperous and progressive. From 
Columbus to the Mayflower, from the Mayflower to 
Washington and the Declaration of Independence, 
from W\ashington and the Declaration of Independ- 
ence to Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation 
are the stepping stones of American liberty and 
modern development. The crowning blessing of this 
majestic evolution is that American citizenship 
which is the common heritage of us all. 



speech to the Ladies in tlie Rotunda of the 

Southern Hotel, Si. Louis, on the 

evening of June 15, 1896. 



Mr. Depew, returning from delivering the oration 
in Convention Hall in aid of the Soldiers' Home, was 
stopped by a crowd of ladies in the rotunda of the 
Southern Hotel who demanded a speech. He spoke 
as follows: 

Ladies: 

After an effort of an hour in the great Convention 
Hall I am too tired to make a speech, especially as I 
have been all the evening trying to reach and inter- 
est an audience of ten thousand people. But who 
can resist the call of the ladies? I never have been 
able to yet, and what is more I never want to be able 
to. I am only waiting for that call to be concen- 
trated and for her to speak. 

You are not delegates to this convention officially, 
but unofficially you are the convention. As the wives 
and sisters of the gentlemen who are to nominate 
the candidates and make the platform which we 
believe the country will adopt, your influence is 
potent both for candidates and principles. In- 
structed as I am by my own State for its favorite 
son, and loyal to his success, I nevertheless feel the 
depressing influence of the great mass of the women 
here who are captured by the brilliant career in the 
field and in Congress of the gallant statesman of Ohio. 



38 

We, of New York, always do our best for our man 
and then go home to carry the Empire State for the 
ticket. We carry back no heart-burnings, no re- 
venges, no envies, no matter what may be the out- 
come of the convention. 

We hear much about the woman in politics, and 
the discussion is never ending whether she should 
be legally there. My experience is that woman is 
always in politics; it is pre-eminently her sphere. I 
do not mean practical i)olitics of caucuses and con- 
ventions, but real politics which govern countries. 
The salons of a succession of brilliant women have 
governed France for two centuries. The parlors of 
Washington are the seats of power. When the ques- 
tion is a moral one, or when the issue is gravely pa- 
triotic, involving the existence of the country, then 
the best canvassers and the most inspiring speakers 
— not upon the platform, but in every home — are 
the women. The women are the hope of the Eepub- 
lican party; they are imbued with its principles and 
inspired by its history. To them the story of its past 
is linked through loved ones who marched and 
fought for their country with the best of family tra- 
ditions and family glory. 

I was crossing the plains to the Pacific Coast a few 
years ago. The train stopped at a station in Wyom- 
ing, the State where women have the right to vote. 
The people on the platform recognized me and in the 
free and off-hand western way came up and gave me 
hospitable greeting. Then one said: "Mr. Depew, 
maybe you will run for President some day, and if 
so, as we have female suffrage in Wyoming, you 
ought to know the ladies." And so the women were 



39 

called and I was introduced. I said to one little 
woman as slie stood beside lier gigantic husband, 
" Do as many women as men vote, in proportion to 
their numbers, in this State?" "More," she an- 
wered. " Well, do you ladies generally vote as your 
husbands wish or as your husbands command?" 
Like the snapping of a bear trap she shot out, " Not 
much," and then she seemed to grow to gigantic pro- 
portions, while, amidst the laughter of the crowd, 
her giant husband became a pigmy. 

You ladies are more speculative than we; you are 
more intense partisans and greater optimists. You 
believe that what you believe must ultimately be the 
accepted faith, because you have no doubt as to its 
being the truth, and you believe that the party of 
your choice must win because it is the right party. 

Let me indulge in a little prediction. Our country 
is now the financial storm center of the world. It 
has been the storm center of liberty and liberty won. 
It has been the storm center of independence and 
independence won. Now that it is the storm center 
of clashing opinions upon those financial principles 
upon which depend the prosperity of a country, I 
believe that the principles which place our country 
in harmony with the great commercial nations of the 
world will win. No other party but the Kepublican 
party professes those principles; no other party but 
the Republican party will declare those principles. 
We will go to the country from this convention stak- 
ing everything upon the gold standard. We will win 
or fall by that issue. But as sure as truth lives, as 
sure as the right prevails, as sure as God has the 
destinies of this countrv in his hands and is to work 



40 

out in the future as He has worked out in the past 
within its borders the problems of happiness for hu- 
manity, so sure is it that the candidates to be nomi- 
nated by this convention and the principles to be 
there adopted — the old principles of the Eepublican 
party — with unalterable devotion to sound finance 
also in the platform, will carry the country. 

When next I meet you, ladies, I trust it will be at 
Washington, when we shall be viewing the Presi- 
dential procession marching down Pennsylvania 
avenue, the hero of it the Eepublican candidate, the 
nominee of this St. Louis convention, triumi)hantly 
elected by the peoi)le. 



speech Nominating Governor Levi P. Morton 

for President of the United States at the 

National Republican Convention, 

St. Louis, on June i6, 1896 



Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen of the Convention: 

National Republican Conventions have been epoch 
makers. They have formulated the principles, orig- 
inated the policies and suggested the measures 
which in the history of the United States form its 
most progressive periods. They have nominated for 
the Presidency statesmen and soldiers who were the 
leaders of the people in their onward march to larger 
libertv and broader and better industrial conditions. 
No party, no matter however glorious its achieve- 
ments or how brilliant its successes, can rely upon 
the past. Its former triumphs are only its certifi- 
cates of character, which must be met by continuing 
effort as beneficent and wise as anything of which it 
boasts. The party which is to permanently govern a 
country and is secure in its past, must not only be 
equal to the present, but must forecast and provide 
for the future. The Republican party has held pos- 
session of the government of the United States for 
more than a generation because it has triumphantly 
met these conditions. The unequalled successes of 
the Republican party, its hold upon the country and 
its masterful influence upon affairs have been due 
to the fact that in every crisis its principles have 
solved the problems of the hour and its selected 



42 

leader has been the man for the occasion. The great- 
est moral and patriotic questions which a free people 
were ever called upon to meet were slavery and se- 
cession in the early days of our organization. But 
with " Union and Liberty " as our watchword and 
with Lincoln as our leader we saved the Republic 
and emancipated the slave. The passionate and crit- 
ical issues of reconstruction were successfully met 
and the hostile sections happily united by a policy 
of conciliation which could only secure the consent 
of the victors and the assent of the conquered by the 
influence of the soldier President who had the confi- 
dence of the armies which he had led in triumph and 
the enemies whom he had paroled with honor. In a 
period when progress halted because of the distrust 
of commonwealths and their citizens of each other 
the later and better judgment of the country ex- 
pressed its acknowledgment to the non-partisanship 
and judicial fairness of Hayes and Evarts. The 
youth who came to manhood after the Civil War and 
knew little of its agonies or its animosities, found a 
glorious example of American possibility and 
achievement in the canal driver, the college student, 
the school principal, the college president, the Union 
general, the illustrious debater in the House of 
Representatives, the brilliant and magnetic Garfield. 
In defeat and in victory, for the policies which stood 
for the development of American industries, for 
America for Americans, whether native or natural- 
ized, and for the reciprocity which bound the North 
American and South American continents together, 
we had the Plumed Knight of our enthusiasm and 
our love, James G. Blaine. As a new generation 



43 

came to the majority, to whom the past was a legend, 
the present, the difficult task of development and 
prosperity and the future theory without experience, 
the Republican party again happily practiced, in its 
control of the executive and the legislative branches 
of the government, that policy of the protection of 
American industries and that practice of sound 
finance which gave to the Republic its era of greatest 
prosperity and its period of the largest returns for 
capital, the fullest employment for labor and the 
highest wages for work in the history of our nation 
in the closing year of the administration of that able 
and accomplished statesman, Benjamin Harrison. 

A few weeks preceding the convention of four 
years ago at Minneapolis I had an afternoon with 
Mr. Blaine. With marvelous intuition he forecast 
the future. He said: " Substantially all the forces 
of opposition, of distrust and of disappointment, of 
theory and of imagination which accumulate against 
a party that has been in power for over thirty years 
are now concentrated for an assault upon our posi- 
tion and is certain to succeed. The Democratic party 
and its allies of Populism and of all other isms are 
destined in this campaign, no matter who is our can- 
didate or what is our platform, to secure possession 
of the government." The country knows to its 
loss, its sorrow and its grief, that the prediction 
has been fulfilled in every part. In its fulfillment 
the United States has the experience and Europe 
has the business and prosperity. 

We meet to take up the broken cord of national 
development and happiness and link it once more to 
the car of progress. Our industries stagnant, our 



44 

manufactures paralyzed, our agriculture disheart- 
ened, our artisans unemployed, our finances disor- 
dered, our treasury bankrupt, our credit impaired, 
our position among the nations of the world ques- 
tioned, all look to this convention and call upon its 
wisdom for hope and rescue. 

The conditions created by the practice of Demo- 
cratic policies, the promise of Democratic measures 
and the differences of Democratic statesmen would 
seem to argue an unquestioned and overwhelming 
triumph for the Republican party in the coming elec- 
tion. No matter how brilliant the x^romise, no 
matter how serene the outlook, it is the part of wis- 
dom, with the uncertainties of politics and our recent 
experience of the tragic shifting of issues, to be care- 
ful, prudent and wise in platform and in candidate. 

I am grieved to see a secession for any cause from 
a Republican Convention. I can honor the intense 
devotion to an idea which impels the delegates repre- 
senting the free coinage of silver constituencies to 
sever lifelong political associations. But I believe 
the gentlemen who have just left us, who are Repub- 
licans on every vital principle of our party, will 
sooner or later rejoin the only party with which they 
can permanently act. The hope of that return is the 
silver lining to our party clouds. I cannot help re- 
minding our departing friends that the streets of 
Heaven are paved with gold, and in rejecting and 
fleeing from that metal on the highway of prosperity 
and progress, there is no intermediate purgatory for 
a resting place. The standard of Heaven is revealed 
and known, that of the other place an experiment. 

The last few years have been a campaign of uni- 



45 

versity extension among the people of the United 
States, and while we may in platform and candidate 
meet all the requirements of party obligations and 
party expectations, we must remember that there is 
a vast constituency which has little fealty to parties 
or to organizations biTt votes for the man and the 
principles which are in accord with their views in the 
administration of the country. The whole country, 
north, south, east and west, w^ithout any division in 
our lines, or out of them, stands, after what has hap- 
pened in the last three years, for the protection of 
American industries, for the principle of reciprocity 
and for America for Americans. But a compact 
neighborhood of great commonwealths, in which are 
concentrated the majority of the population, of the 
manufactures and of the industrial energies of the 
United States, has found that business and credit 
exist only with the stability of sound money. 

It has become the fashion of late to decry busi- 
ness as unpatriotic. We hear much of the " sordid 
considerations of capital," " employment," "■ indus- 
trial energies " and " prosperous labor." The United 
States differing from the medieval conditions which 
govern older countries, differing from the militarism 
which is the curse of Euroj)ean nations, differing 
from thrones which rest upon the sword is preemi- 
nently and patriotically a commercial and a business 
nation. Thus commerce and business are synony- 
mous with patriotism. When the farmer is afield 
sowing and reaping the crops which find a market 
that remunerates him for for his toil, when the 
laborer and the artizan find work seeking them and 
not themselves despairing of work, when the wage of 



46 

the toiler promises comfort for his family and hope 
for his children, when the rail is burdened with the 
product of the soil and of the factory, when the spin- 
dles are humming and the furnaces are in blast, 
when the mine is putting out its largest product and 
the national and individual wealth are constantly 
increasing, when the homes owned unmortgaged by 
the people are more numerous day by day and month 
by month, when the schools are most crowded, the 
fairs most frequent and happy conditions most uni- 
versal in the nation, then are the promises fulfilled 
which make these United States of America the 
home of the oppressed and the land of the free. 

It is to meet these conditions and to meet them 
with a candidate who represents them and about 
whom there can be no question, that New York pre- 
sents to you for the Presidency, under the unanimous 
instructions of two successive Republican State Con- 
ventions, the name of her Governor, Levi P. Morton. 
New York is the cosmopolitan State of the Union. 
She is both a barometer and thermometer of the 
changes of popular opinion and popular passion. She 
has been the pivotal commonwealth which has de- 
cided nearly every one of the national elections in 
this generation. She has more Yankees than any 
city in New England, more Southerners than any 
community in the south and more native-born West- 
erners than any city in the west and the representa- 
tives of the Pacific coast within her borders have 
been men who have done much for the develop- 
ment of that glorious region. These experienced 
and cosmopolitan citizens with their fingers upon the 
pulses of the finance and trade of the whole country, 



47 

feel instantly the conditions that lead to disaster or 
to prosperity. Hence they swing the State sometime 
to the Eepublican and sometime to the Democratic 
column. 

In the tremendous effort to break the hold which 
Democracy had upon our commonwealth, and which 
it had strengthened for ten successive years, we se- 
lected as our standard bearer the gentleman whom I 
present on behalf of our State here to-day and who 
carried New York, and took the Legislature with 
him, by one hundred and fifty-six thousand majority. 

We are building a navy and the White Squadron 
is a forerunner of a commerce which is to whiten 
every sea and carry our flag into every port of the 
world. Not our wish perhaps, nor our ambitions 
probably, but our very progress and expansion have 
made us one of the family of nations. We can no 
longer without the hazard of unnecessary frictions, 
with other governments, conduct our foreign policy 
except through the medium of a skilled diplomacy. 
For four years as minister to France, when critical 
questions of the import of our products into that 
country were imminent, Levi P. Morton learned and 
practiced successfully the diplomacy which was best 
for the prosperity of his country. None of the mis- 
takes which have discredited our relations with for- 
eign nations during the past four years could occur 
under his administrations. He is the best type 
of the American business man — that type which 
is the ideal of school, the academy and the col- 
lege, that type which the mother presents to her 
boy in the western cabin and in the eastern tene- 
ment as she is marking out for him a career by 



48 

which he shall rise from his poor surroundings 
to grasp the prizes which come through Ameri- 
can liberty and American opportunity. You see 
the picture. The New England clergyman on his 
meagre salary, the large family of boys and girls 
about him, the sons going out with their common 
school education, the boy becoming the clerk in the 
store, then granted an interest in the business, then 
becoming its controlling spirit, then claiming the at- 
tention of the great house in the city and called to a 
partnership, then himself the master of great affairs. 
Overwhelmed by the incalculable conditions of civil 
war, but with undaunted energy and foresight, he 
grasped again the elements of escape out of bank- 
ruptcy and of success and with the return of pros- 
perity, he paid to the creditors who had compromised 
his indebtedness, every dollar, principal and interest, 
of what he owed them. The best type of a successful 
business man, he turns to politics, to be a useful 
member of Congress, to diplomacy, to be a successful 
minister abroad, to the executive and administrative 
branches of government, to be the most popular Vice- 
President and the presiding officer of that most 
august body, the Senate of the United States. 

Our present deplorable industrial and financial 
conditions are largely due to the fact that while we 
have a President and a cabinet of acknowledged abil- 
ity, none of them have had business training or expe- 
rience. They are persuasive reasoners upon indus- 
trial questions, but have never practically solved in- 
dustrial problems. They are the book farmers who 
raise w^heat at the cost of orchids and sell it at the 
price of wheat. With Levi P. Morton there would be 



49 

no deficiency to be met by the issue of bonds, there 
would be no blight upon our credit which would call 
for the services of a syndicate, there would be no tri- 
fling with the delicate intricacies of finance and com- 
merce which would paralyze the operations of trade 
and manufacture. 

Whoever may be nominated by this convention 
will receive the cordial support, the enthusiastic ad- 
vocacy of the Eepublicans of New York, but in the 
shifting conditions of our commonwealth. Governor 
Morton can secure more than the party strength, and 
without question in the coming canvass, no matter 
what issues may arise between now and November, 
place the Empire State solidly in the Republican 

column. 

4 



Speecli at the National Republican Convention 

in Response to the Motion Malcing the 

Nomination of Major McKinley 

Unanimous, June i6, 1896. 



Gentlemen: 

We of New York have made our battle for our 
favorite son. We have followed the instructions of 
the convention which sent us here and we have been 
honorably beaten. We not only bow to the will of 
the majority, but we hail its choice with ardor and 
enthusiasm. W^e will go home to work night and 
day for the election of McKinley. We will roll up 
for him the largest majority which the Empire State 
has ever given any presidential candidate since the 
Civil war. It will not count by thousands, but by 
hundreds of thousands. 

Since we have been here in touch with the rest of 
the country, we have felt the strength of his popu- 
larity and the power of his hold upon the people of 
the United States. He is not unknown to us. On the 
contrary, he has spoken all over our State and every- 
where is loved and honored as a great leader of our 
Kepublican party. He embodies more than any 
other man living the vital principle of the protection 
of American industries, the principle which has de- 
veloped our resources, which has made our country 
so marvelously prosperous, the beneficent principle 
of the Republican party. 



52 

The father of one of the candidates before this con- 
vention was a New England Puritan minister in a 
little New England mountain hamlet. It was said 
of him that though he had thirteen children and a 
salary of only three hundred dollars a year, yet he was 
marvelously gifted in prayer. As the news of this 
nomination of McKinley is flashed over our country 
to-night and read to-morrow morning in every far- 
mer's house and miner's cottage, in every store and 
factory, on every street corner, among those who 
are at work, and the thousands who are unemployed, 
there will be millions of the men and women who 
will be marvelously gifted in prayer — first, the 
prayer of thanksgiving and praise that the man who 
represents the principle of protection which gave 
them work and wages, and homes and happiness is 
the candidate of the Kepublican party; and then the 
prayer of petition to the Almighty that among the 
dispensations of His providences will be the election 
of William McKinley to the Presidency of the United 
States. 



Speecli on tlie Issues of tlie Campaign to an 

Audience of 28,000 People, at tlie Coliseum, 

Chicago, October 9, 1896. 



Felloic Citizens: 

Chicago was burned to the ground in 1871. Such 
a calamity never before befell a great city. Her peo- 
ple stood bewildered, but undaunted, amid the ashes 
of their homes, their business and their fortunes. 

It took them two years to readjust their relation 
with the business and credit of the country, and then 
they proceeded to rebuild their city upon a scale 
grander than they had ever dreamed before. They 
found the money with which to do it from the sav- 
ings banks, the life insurance companies, the capital- 
ists of the east and from Europe. Then came the 
crime of '73, by which silver was demonetized and 
the United States went upon the gold standard. 
Twenty-three years have passed, and Chicago, the 
metropolis of the west, the largest and the most hope- 
ful business center in the world, the home of great 
industries, the seat of a population which has grown 
nearly ten-fold during this period, presents the most 
marvelous object lesson in the story of finance, in 
the story of gold as a standard of value, of the value 
of gold as an unvarying standard by which to meas- 
ure all other kinds of currency and all the product 
of the farm and factory, of brains and of labor. A 
hundred and fifty thousand men marching the streets 
to-day, proud of their American citizenship, no 



54 

matter where they were born, proud of Chicago, glo- 
r^'ing in the past and hopeful of the future, spoke 
with a voice which will be heard all over this land 
for honest money and the national honor. Even our 
misguided friends, who marched to-night under 
the banner of free coinage of silver, did so because 
the streets, the avenues upon which they marched, 
the houses in which they lived, the factories in which 
they worked, railways upon which they labored, 
were all of them marvelous creations in twenty-three 
years of business carried on under the gold standard. 
I was delighted to have for my escort to-night, my 
friends, the wheelmen. It takes a first-class row 
among fair-minded men, who have hitherto known 
little of each other, for them to become well ac- 
c[uainted and friends. The New York Central is now 
carrying the wheelman and his wheel, and I hail 
these swift messengers of the prosi)erity and energy 
of the Republic as one of the most active and most 
intelligent agencies in distributing sound money lit- 
erature and resting from their wheels to enforce 
sound money doctrine. People who travel much and 
with their eyes wide open are generally the best 
judges of what is best for the country, and the wheel- 
men and the commercial travelers are almost unani- 
mously for McKinley, sound money and prosperity. 
In all other ( anvasses they have been divided, as have 
all other vocations and pursuits and conditions of 
people in the United States. There will always be, 
and it is best for the country that there should be, 
a fair division of parties upon economic questions. 
We can differ upon protection and free trade; w^e 
can differ upon a system of banking as to whether 



55 

the greenbacks should be retired and the currency 
issues be left to the national banks and the law of 
supply and demand; we can differ as to questions of 
internal improvements and reciprocity, but we can- 
not differ on questions which affect the life of our 
nation or the honor of our country, or the inviolabil- 
ity of our credit. 

In 1880 Garfield was elected by a narrow margin; 
in 1884 the Democrats came in and Cleveland was 
elected by a small majority; in 1888 Harrison was 
elected by a few thousand; in 1892 Cleveland carried 
the country. These were the healthy and natural 
divisions into great parties which constitute the 
strength and perpetuity of free government. But, 
when the lunatics and theorists and experiment- 
alists got possession of the Democratic convention 
at Chicago and drove out nine-tenths of the experi- 
enced brains of the organization, and when they 
made their alliance with the idiotic asylum at St. 
Louis, the safety of the country demanded that sane 
men, without regard to previous party affiliations, 
should combine and save the honor and business of 
the nation. They have done so with a unanimity 
which has excited the astonishment and admiration 
of every one. In all previous contests the news- 
papers were about equally divided; the leaders in 
the professions in business, and in the trades were 
about equally divided; colleges were about equally 
divided. Now ninety-nine per cent, of the pro- 
fessors in the colleges in the country are for McKin- 
ley and sound money. All of the Republicans of 
national fame, with about three exceptions, are for 
McKinley and the national honor. All the Demo- 



56 

crats, including the President and cabinet, who 
have for a generation held the confidence of their 
party and the respect of the country, have placed 
the national honor, the national faith and na- 
tional and individual credit above a captured 
and corrupted organization. Four-fifths of the 
labor leaders are for McKinley and prosperity. 
The pulpit, usually averse to taking sides in 
partisan politics, preaches with tremendous ear- 
nestness from the commandment: "Thou shalt 
not steal." With the intelligence, integrity, busi- 
ness sagacity and conscience of our people so unani- 
mously arrayed on the right side, we wonder why 
there should be any other side. For the silver ele- 
ment we can account because of the persistent edu- 
cation carried on for the last ten years by a syndicate 
of mine owners and because there are in every com- 
munity sensible men on all questions but one. On 
that there is a wheel wrong in their heads. But for 
the revolutionary part of the program of the popo- 
cratic party, we can only account by ascribing it to 
the socialistic and anarchistic party who are seeking 
to overturn all existing institutions without present- 
ing any program for better ones in their place. But 
there are historical reasons for temporary crazes like 
this. They account for their existence and promise 
their disappearance. Whenever in the history of 
the world there has been a great epidemic, it has been 
the opportunity of the fanatic and the crank. As 
the black death, or the plague or the cholera, have 
swept their tens of thousands in the grave, the 
religious fanatic has cried : " The church is a 
failure; I am insinred; follow me." They go with 



57 

him in the wilderness, and perish, or they give away 
their property because the world is coming to an end 
at ten minutes past twelve, and they won't need sil- 
ver in the next w orld ; or they go out at dawn in the 
morning, as they are now doing in New York, and 
walk barefooted on the grass to cure consumption. 
So, in times of commercial disturbance, financial 
difficulty and industrial distress, the financial theo- 
rist and experimentalist has his opportunity, and he 
never proposes but one remedy, and that is debased 
currency — manufacture more so-called money, and 
so make money cheap. In every instance, in the 
whole history of the world, where money has been 
debased, the standard of money destroyed and the 
currency cheapened, it has ruined the nation, de- 
stroyed business and reduced populations to poverty, 
despair and starvation. 

We hear much of the crime of '73. We are told 
that silver was demonetized by a trick. We are in- 
formed that the panic which began in '93 and is still 
on was caused by the demonetization of silver in 1873. 
There must be mighty little active energy in silver 
if it takes twenty years after vaccination for the in- 
flammation to break out. Who w^ere the criminals? 
First, they Vv^ere Senator Stewart, president^of the 
Chicago Popocratic convention, v/ho spoke in favor 
of gold as the only standard while the bill was under 
consideration. Second, it was Senator Jones, of Ne- 
vada, who said on the same debate, " Gold is the only 
standard among great commercial peoples," and 
Jones has furnished the ablest and most productive 
of the silver literature. Bryan must hang them; 
he must suspend upon the same gallows every living 



58 

member of the Congress of 1873, both in the Senate 
and House, because they all voted for this bill. But, 
says Mr. Bryan, it was on their desks for a year and 
a half; it was debated through 153 pages of the Con- 
gressional Kecord, but not a member of either house 
understood the most important bill of the session. 
If Bryan is right what a collection of idiots the Con- 
gress of '73 must have been. But silver was demone- 
tized by Jefferson's order to the mint to coin no more 
silver dollars in 1806; so he must go to Monticello, 
and take out the bones of Jefferson from their tomb 
and hang them as an exhibit, and as the creator of 
this crime, as Charles II. did of Cromwell. He must 
go to the hermitage and disturb the sacred resting 
place of General Jackson and put his skeleton on 
exhibit. He must go to Marshfield for Webster and 
to Ashland for Clav, and to South Carolina for Cal- 
houn, and to Missouri for Thomas H. Benton, and to 
Auburn for William H. Seward, for either in 1834 or 
in 1853, when a law was passed making silver cur- 
rency only in amounts under five dollars, or in '73, 
they spoke for, advised and voted for the demoneti- 
zation of silver. 

V/ho are the criminals upon the gallows and who 
are the hangmen, who, as the representatives of the 
virtue and intelligence of our day, have executed 
just judgment upon these enemies of their country? 
The criminals are all the presidents, from Jefferson 
to Garfield ; all the cabinet ministers from Hamilton 
to John A. Dix, all the mighty men of debate from 
Madison and Webster and Clay to Abraham Lincoln 
and James G. Blaine. They are all the treasures of 
statesmanship and patriotism that our country pos- 



591 

sesses. And who are their judges and executioners? 
Bryan and Sewall and Watson. This famous spike 
team, which is now careering and cavorting about 
the country; the wild broncho of Nebraska in the 
lead; the staid, slow, Puritan nag from Maine at the 
wheel, and his mate, the untamed colt from Georgia, 
trying not to pull the wagon, but to kick the stufdng 
out of the Puritan. 

We have absolute liberty in this country of politi- 
cal freedom and religious toleration. We permit 
the Chinaman to worship his joss, and the Jap to bow 
before Buddha. The policy gambler to clasp his 
hands and knock his head on the floor in supersti- 
tious reverence of the mystical figures 4-11-44, and 
so we must view with toleration the followers of this 
new religion, who see salvation in 16 to 1. Where 
is the sacredness that makes sixteen ounces of silver 
for one of gold the foundation stone of our national 
greatness, business prosperity and human happi- 
ness? When Columbus discovered America ten 
ounces of silver were equal to one of gold. The statue 
standing in front of the Auditorium on the lake front 
at Chicago casts a bronze smile of contempt at the 
limitless brass which discredits the standard of Col- 
umbus' period. W^hen the Pilgrim fathers landed 
upon Plymouth Eock and created a government of 
just and equal laws, thirteen ounces of silver were 
equal to one of gold. Brewster and Carver and Win- 
throp, and old Jonathan Edwards and the other 
Puritan fathers rise from their graves to rebuke 
Bryan and Sewall and Watson and the rest when 
they say that 16 to 1 in 1896 is more sacred than 13 
to 1 in 1620. 



60 

Truthful, honest, religious men, as those old Puri- 
tans were, they say to those modern advocates of sil- 
ver, " You are liars and frauds. Yf hen we said that 
thirteen ounces of silver were equal to one of gold, 
we stated what was the truth, for then thirteen 
ounces of silver had the same market value as 
one of gold. Y^hen you say that sixteen ounces 
of silver is equal to one of gold, you are per- 
petrating a monstrous fraud, because even we, 
as the ghosts of men, who have been buried for 
two hundred and fifty years, know enough of the 
conditions in the world to-day to know that it takes 
thirty-two ounces of silver to buy one ounce of gold." 
Y^hen our forefathers had driven the British from 
the country and created a free and independent 
republic, they declared that the standard of value 
between silver and gold v>^as fifteen ounces of 
silver to one of gold. They were patriots; they 
loved their country; they knew that the young repub- 
lic could only live upon an immutable standard, and 
so, after investigating the question, in Europe, as 
Hamilton said, they decided that 15 to 1 was the ex- 
act ratio. Y^hen we ask Mr. Bryan why he repudia- 
ted Columbus and the Puritan fathers and the found- 
ers of the republic, why he proclaims that the govern- 
ment must say that sixteen ounces of silver is equal 
in value and must be taken by the people as equal in 
value to one ounce of gold for the products of their 
farms, the output of their factory and their labor, 
when he knows that by doing so they are only getting 
half value and a fraudulent return to the farm, the 
manufacturer and the wage-earner, his answer is: 
" Times have changed since the revolutionary war, 
and I'm not George Washington." 



61 

Bryan and Sewall and Watson proclaim a revolu- 
tion. They do not propose, as has always been pro- 
posed in every canvass before, measures within con- 
stitutional limits and well settled principles of gov- 
ernment, but they seek to overthrow all the experi- 
ence and all the wisdom of the past, to enter upon a 
wild career of constitutional and economic changes. 
We all admit the right of revolution and its necessity 
to escape oppression and tryanny and establish lib- 
erty. Our forefathers exercised the right when they 
resisted the encroachments upon their liberties by 
the mother country and won their independence. But 
revolutions are never justifiable unless the wrongs 
are beyond remedy by the people. We have no 
thrones, no house of lords, no privileged classes. 
Every four years the people at the ballot box decide 
who shall be their President, and every two years 
who shall be their congressmen. We, the people, 
make our own laws, and we, the people, are inter- 
ested in their enforcement. 

Eevolution means the most frightful disasters in 
business, in employment, and in the happiness of the 
people. Temporarily, it suspends industries and 
paralyzes markets. The Popocratic convention pro- 
poses in its program to destroy the Supreme Court of 
the United States as it now exists under the constitu- 
tion; to prohibit the issue of bonds to carry on the 
government and maintain its credit; to destroy the 
sacredness of private contracts between individuals, 
as now guaranteed by the constitution; to destroy 
the standard of value upon which is based the sol- 
vency and credit of all civilized nations; to debase 
the currency and issue fiat money. When the fathers 
of our republic were making a nation they had before 



62 

them the example of the French revolution. They 
saw each party as it came in power, send to the guil- 
lotine the leaders of the opposition; they saw a harlot 
placed upon a throne and worshipped by a nation as 
the representative of the reign of reason, which was 
to bring a new and better era to the world. They 
made up their minds to establish a government with 
a written constitution, which could not be destroyed 
by temporary madness. They provided how that 
constitution could be amended if the people wanted 
it amended, but they gave them ample time 
to consider before it was done. They created a 
Supreme Court v/ith the majestic power, a new 
power and a new condition in government; the power 
to say to Congress and to President, " The law which 
you have passed oversteps the limits of the constitu- 
tion. If you want to legislate on that subject you 
must pass a law that is in the lines of the constitu- 
tion." This Supreme Court by its decisions has given 
to the Federal government the powers which have 
enabled it to protect its life, to put rebellion down 
and save liberty. There are two places in this coun- 
try where all men are absolutely equal. Where the 
poor and the rich, the fortunate and the unfortunate, 
have the same power and the same standard: one is 
the ballot box and the other the Supreme Court. The 
poorer, the more unfortunate, the weaker the citizen, 
the more he should strive to sustain the indepen- 
dence of the courts, for in them alone can he find 
protection against the strong and the wicked. 

Bryan proposes to abolish the Supreme Court and 
make it the creature of the party caucus whenever a 
new congress comes in. Because it decided the in- 



63 

come tax to be unconstitutional. It decided not that 
an income tax is unconstitutional, but that the law 
passed by the Popocratic Congress was unconstitu- 
tional; or in other words, that this party hadn't 
brains enough to frame a constitutional law. I will 
undertake to retain any one of a dozen lawyers 
whom I could name in Chicago who could draft 
a law on this subject which the Supreme Court 
would hold to be constitutional. Abolishing the 
Supreme Court will not furnish constructive talent 
to Mr. Bryan's party. There are three things legis- 
lation cannot do. It cannot give experience to a 
child, even if he is thirty-six years old. It cannot 
put sense where nature has failed to put it, and it 
cannot make fifty cents a dollar. 

The Declaration of Independence guarantees to 
every citizen, life, liberty and the pursuit of happi- 
ness. When Mr. Cleveland and the government went 
into Chicago and permitted the railway trains to 
move, they were simply carrying out that provision. 
All men are created equal, says the Declaration of 
Independence, with certain inalienable rights, 
among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of hap- 
piness. When a hundred or a thousand men in a 
mob stop railroad trains all over the country, and 
prevent the mails, which carry letters of business, of 
family and affection, sick people who must be speed- 
ily got to hospitals or homes, husbands who are try- 
ing to reach their wives, mothers who are flying to 
their children, and lovers who are speeding to their 
girls, that mob is destroying the equal right of mil- 
lions of people, to life, to liberty, and to the pursuit 
of happiness, and it is the duty of the government to 
clear the highway and let the people move. 



64 

Mr. Bryan, passing through Chicago, advised the 
workingmen to wear McKinley buttons and march in 
the procession to-day to keep from being dis- 
charged by their employers, but to vote for him. He 
has made three thousand speeches, and in every one 
of them has charged that employers are coercing 
their employes and advising the employes to assert 
their independence. I say this is a monstrous slan- 
der on the workingmen of this country. They are 
independent. Under the Australian ballot they are 
in the box with no witnesses of their act but God. 
There is absolute freedom among railroad men, and 
that I know. No president, no superintendent, no 
manager controls, or attempts to control, their politi- 
cal action. There are thirty thousand employes in the 
New York Central system of which I am president. I 
go out every year upon the stump to speak for what I 
believe to be right, which is the Eepublican party and 
protection and sound money. And every one of my 
fellow employes knows that he can vote against my 
politics and talk against my politics and work 
against my politics. 

Major Priest died the other day at the age of ninety, 
having been an employe of the New York Central for 
fifty years. He was a Democrat of Democrats, and the 
leader of his party in the Mohawk valley. He was 
my political opponent, my subordinate, whom I 
could discharge, and my personal friend. It would 
have been dangerous to the health and good looks 
of any demagogue to tell the old major that he could 
not work and vote for the Democratic ticket. In 
the Cleveland canvass of '92 I spoke as now for the 
Republican ticket. I said after one of the meetings 



65 

to a switcliman in the yards: " Well, Jerry, how do 
you stand this year?" He said: "Boss, that's a 
good speech you made last night, but the boys are 
agin you this time," and a large majority of the em- 
ployes of the New York Central voted for Cleveland, 
though both their president and chairman of the 
board, Mr. Vanderbilt, were for Harrison. 1 said 
to Jerry the other day: " Well, Jerry, how are you 
now?" He said: "Boss, we're all with you this 
time. No 50-cent dollars for us." 

As one of the largest employers of labor in the 
United States, in my official capacity, as a laborer 
myself upon the pay-roll and liable to be dismissed as 
any of the others by the superior power of the board 
of directors, I resent, I repel this insult to the man- 
hood and the independence of the workingmen of 
the United States — this insult to their intelligence, 
for they know better. 

We have been for three years suffering from an in- 
dustrial depression greater than ever before. For nine- 
teen years, from 1873 to 1892, under a gold stand- 
ard, our country had prospered as never before. 
Wages had advanced, the country every year sus- 
tained in comfort an increasing population, and 
the output of our farms and our factories made 
us the industrial leader of the world. The blight 
which came upon us, from my point of view, was 
first, the threat and limited execution of free trade, 
and next, and still worse, the assault upon confi- 
dence by the action of Mr. Bryan's party in holding 
up the government and refusing supplies, preventing 
its having adequate revenue and tampering with the 

currency. 

5 



66 

What are the remedies? We say, return to the 
paths of prosperity; get out of the woods and into 
the roads that lead to markets and to employment. 
In all his speeches, Mr. Bryan endeavors to excite 
employes against employers; wage earners against 
wage payers. I state this proposition without fear 
of contradiction — a proposition which every work- 
ingman knows to be true — that if the employer and 
his employes are agreed upon wages and hours, 
then their interests are the same. The employe 
wants the factory or the furnace or the mills to have 
orders, to have a market vv^hich will take its product; 
otherwise he cannot have employment, or he will 
have to work on half time. He wants his employer 
to extend his business, to double it, to treble it, to 
quadruple it, because that means that more of his fel- 
lows shall receive emploj-ment. It means that he 
shall share in this prosperitj^ by an increase of pay. 
This panic has thrown ninety thousand railroad men 
off the pay-roll. No one feels worse about that than 
the directors and the presidents and the managers. 
There are fifty thousand cars lying idle between New 
York and Chicago and St. Louis. That means loco- 
motive engineers and firemen and brakemen and 
switchmen out of employment. That means less 
work in the shops and mechanics laid off. That 
means that the mill is no longer sending out its pro- 
duct, and the farmer no longer finds a market. 

What I want, what I pray for, what I am out trav- 
eling for, night and day, making speeches, to bring 
about is to change all this. Now I am distressed 
and my heart is wrung by men and their wives and 
their daughters coming to me for employment. 



>7 



What I want is to see the day and to see it speedily, 
when I shall be seeking men, when I shall be adver- 
tising for engineers and firemen and switchmen on 
the New York Central railroad. When every rail- 
road president and manager will be in a position to 
employ all the skilled railway labor there is in the 
country and be calling upon the farms for their boys 
to enter the service. 

When times are hard, cars are idle, trains are dis- 
continued and a portion of the force has no work, 
the railroad president finds it impossible to keep up 
the efficiency of his road and the equipment and to 
satisfy his stockholders with dividends. In the last 
three years one-third of the railroad mileage of the 
country has gone into bankruptcy, stopped paying 
dividends and stopped paying interest upon a large 
amount of their bonds. 

Mr. Bryan and his friends are hov»ding about the 
oppression of capital and that the demonetization of 
silver in '73 has led to two things, they say: One, 
the increase of returns to capital, and the other op- 
pression and reduction of returns to labor. Nothing 
in my time has equaled the adamantine cheek with 
which the Popocratic orators turn facts into fiction. 
Since '73 the wages of labor in every branch of in- 
dustry have increased sixty per cent. The returns 
upon capital have fallen one-half. The wages on 
the New York Central railroad in 1873 were, for 
engineers |80 on passenger trains; now they are |150 
a month; for freight engineers in '73, $60; now |100. 
Firemen then received |40 a month; now |75 on 
passenger trains and $60 on freight trains. Train- 
men then received $35 a month; now they receive 



68 



from $45 to $50. Trackmen then received 87^ 
cents a day; now they receive $1.35. The Central 
railroad received in '73 one cent and thirty-one hun- 
dreths a ton per mile for the carriage of the products 
of the farm. Last year we got only seventy-five one- 
hundredths of a cent a ton per mile. We paid form- 
erly eight per cent, to our stockholders; now we pay 
four. This reduction of one-half in the freight 
charges of the New York Central has come entirely 
out of capital and been divided between the con- 
sumer and the producer. While the employes, in- 
stead of sharing in the burden, have had their wages 
continuously advanced. In 1873 the western farmer 
and builder paid one per cent, a month for his money, 
now, if the security is good, they get it at five and six 
per cent, a year. 

Mr. Bryan says we want more money, and the free 
coinage of silver will give it to us. We had $18.50 of 
money for every man, woman and child in 1873, and 
we have $23 for every man, woman and child in 1896. 
We have, in addition, unissued money in the treas- 
ury, which, if the country would take it, would make 
the amount for each person $34. We do not want 
more money; we want credit and confidence. We 
have the largest internal commerce of any country 
in the world. It is greater than the tonnage of all 
the ships on the ocean and all the railroads in all 
countries outside the United States. If this com- 
merce, carried upon our railroads, rivers and canals, 
had to be handled in money, the gold and silver cur- 
rency of all the nations of Europe and of America 
besides, would not be sufficient. Ninety-eight per 
cent, of the currency which makes possible this vast 



69' 

internal trade, are checks, drafts, bills of exchange 
and credits. 

If this country and the world has confidence in the 
stability of our currency, then we have the conditions 
of confidence instead of the disasters of distrust. 
Confidence means the spindles humming, the fur- 
naces in blast, the machinery of the mills and the 
factories working to the limit of their capacities, 
the farmer finding a ready and remunerative market 
at the neighboring town for his products, work seek- 
ing men, and not men seeking work, mortgages paid 
off, homes acquired, the schools full of children, the 
railroads crowded with freight and passengers, holi- 
days and picnics and general happiness and pros- 
perity. Mr. Bryan says that his experiment of the 
free coinage of silver will, of course, cause a panic. 
The boy of the Platte in his reckless talk, does not 
understand the horrors of a panic. We swallowed 
a potato bug four years ago and now he proposes 
that we take a dose of Paris green to kill it. A panic 
means the banks refusing to loan because the depos- 
itors are calling for their money; it means the closing 
of the mills and shops and factories and mines; it 
means the big mercantile establishments going into 
bankruptcy and their clerks in the streets; it means 
thousands of honest toilers seeking jobs without find- 
ing them, and returning to homes where there are 
hungry children and despairing wives. To talk 
lightly of panic is to be indifferent to human misery 
and a crime against suffering humanity. 

But Mr. Bryan is to cure all this by his remedy 
working after the panic. He is like the doctor, the 
quack doctor, who said to the patient, when the pa- 



70' 

tient asked him: " Doctor, what is the matter with 
me, anyhow? " " Well," said the doctor, " my friend, 
hanged if I know, but the post-mortem will reveal it." 

The orators of this new creed say that with the 
free coinage of silver there will be unlimited money 
for every one. But money can be had only in two 
ways; by stealing it, or giving labor or some product 
of value in exchange for it. After the silver mine 
owner has had his millions of silver bullion coined 
into bright and glittering dollars, saying on one side 
" This is a dollar," and stamped on the other, " In 
God we trust," and worth only fifty-three cents, he 
will not give it to any one, unless that person can 
give him something of value in exchange, or labor in 
exchange. This whole scheme is a gigantic con- 
spiracy with a. few able and unscrupulous directors 
and many dupes. 

In traveling across the continent I met most of the 
leading directors, managers and owners in the silver 
mining industry, and such of them as would frankly 
discuss the question said that at the present price 
of labor many mines of low grade ores could not 
be worked at a profit. But if they could get the 
free coinage of silver at the ratio of IG to 1 the de- 
mand for silver for coinage would appreciate the 
price of it, and a silver dollar being worth only fifty- 
three cents in legal tender, they could pay their work- 
men in these silver dollars, and so get down the 
wages of the miners. Thus, they would make money, 
estimated at f3G,000,000 a year out of the general 
public of the United States on the one hand and 
make more by this compulsory reduction of wages 
to their employes on the other. 



71 

To support his theory of the free coinage of silver, 
Mr. Bryan has called upon Bismarck. And Bis- 
marck, without approving the plan has said "yes, you 
are a young and vigorous nation and just the country 
to try." Bismarck, in 1871, demonetized silver in 
Germany and established the gold standard. It left 
Germany with three hundred millions of silver in the 
treasury, which, on account of the fall in the price 
of the metal, she has been unable to dispose of. So 
Bismarck says, as experience has often said to cred- 
ulity before, to this callow youth of the Platte, " of 
course, your great country can try the free coinage of 
silver, and the world will look on with eagerness for 
the result of your experiment," and then the grand 
old statesman quietly sends word to the German 
treasurer, " Be sure you get our silver in the United 
States mints first." 

He calls upon James G. Blaine as a witness, but 
while Blaine favored bimetallism, if the parity of the 
two metals could be maintained at the gold standard, 
he was always the enemy of the debasement of the 
currency, the repudiation of debts or a stain upon 
the national honor. He calls Henrv Ward Beecher 
as a witness and said in his Brooklyn speech that if 
Beecher were alive he would stand beside him as a 
friend of humanity. But Beecher is alive in the 
speeches which he has left behind him, and on 
Thanksgiving Day, 1877, Beecher spoke thus: 
" Whenever in any nation, there is such an attempt 
to tamper with standards that the moral sense of 
man is bewildered and liberty is given to unprinci- 
pled men at large, to cheat, to be unfaithful to obli- 
gation, to refuse the payment of honest debts, it is all 



72 

the worse if done with the permission of the law. 
Whoever tampers with established standards, tam- 
pers with the very marrow and vitality of the public 
faith. Gold is the world's standard; gold is the uni- 
versal measure of value; gold is king in commerce, 
all other money must represent gold." 

Mr. Bryan calls Lincoln as a witness to support his 
revolutionary scheme to prevent the President of the 
United States from sending troops into a State to 
suppress riot and disorder, unless the Governor of 
the State asks it. It was Abraham Lincoln who, 
against the protest of Governors, sent Grant through 
Kentucky to Donelson and Shiloh and Vicksburg; 
sent Sherman from Atlanta to the sea, and sent the 
Army of the Potomac from Washington to Appo- 
mattox. Mr. Bryan, when he cites facts, finds them 
refuted by history and by experience, and when he 
cites witnesses, they are all testifying against him. 
The saints of the Republic rise from their graves to 
protest against his misquotations of their utterances 
and falsifications of their positions. 

I said of Mr, Bryan, when the audience left him in 
Madison Square garden, that he was like Casablanca, 

The boy stood on the burning deck, 
Whence all but him had fled, 

After jN'ovember 3d, as I find from my western 
trip, the resemblance will be still more striking, for 
the poet says: 

There came a burst of thunder sound, 

The boy, oh, where was he 
Ask of the winds that far around 

With fragments strewed the sea. 

Major McKinley, on the other hand, every day, and 
many times a day, in speeches to delegations visiting 



7S 

him at his home, calls as witnesses to his position on 
finance, on currency, on protection, on patriotism, 
on national honor and on national credit, all the 
great statesmen of the nation, and Washington and 
Hamilton, and Jackson and Lincoln, and Grant and 
Garfield shout through the record of their lives and 
their utterances when alive, "Amen, McKinley." 

Against the misinformation, the inexperience, the 
unfitness for the greatest office in the world of Wil- 
liam Jennings Bryan, we place this type of our best 
citizenship, this model soldier, statesman and man. 
Major McKinley. When, at eighteen years of age, he 
was working and studying to enter college, Sumter 
was fired upon, the next day found him enlisted in the 
Twenty-third Ohio. At the battle of Antietam, he 
was commissary sergeant in charge of the rations in 
the rear. Along in the afternoon, he thought the 
boys in front must be hungry and thirsty. He was 
in a safe place, but he prepared the sandwiches and 
boiled the coffee and loaded two mule wagons and 
through the hail of shot and shell drove to the front. 
The mules and driver of one wagon were killed, but 
the other got through, and amid the cheers of the 
brigade. Sergeant McKinley served the coffee. 

As lieutenant, McKinley in one of the battles of 
the wilderness, was ordered to carry a command 
to a regiment isolated by the retreat and about to be 
captured, to join the brigade. The hoofs of his horse 
as he galloped across the plain did not stir up the 
dust more rapidly than the bullets which fell thickly 
around him. But he reached the regiment, gave the 
order and saved it from surrender. Then he became 
Major McKinley. 



74 

He has earned by his services in Congress one more 
responsibility. That the people of the United States 
will give him on the 3d of November, with a unan- 
imity and enthusiasm unprecedented in our election, 
and the title will be William McKinley, President 
of the United States. 



Speecli delivered at the Dinner of the New Eng- 
land Society at Washington on Fore- 
fathers' Day, December 22, 1897. 



Mr. President and Gentlemen: 

That I should leave New York late this afternoon 
and travel 240 miles to dine with you seems to justify 
the charge so often made against me, that I will go 
any distance for a dinner. But the fact that the 
dinner is the frugal fare of the Puritans also ijroves 
that I am not particular about the dinner. 

Nothing better illustrates the progress of our cen- 
tury and the difference between the days of the fore- 
fathers and our own than this trip. A busy man of 
affairs, I left New York at the close of business hours, 
I am in Washington in time for this celebration, hav- 
ing prepared my speech on the route, and, sleeping 
comfortably on the car, will be at my office again 
before business hours in the morning. 

My ancestors having arrived in this country among 
the early settlers, on the one side in New York, on 
the other in New England, and having fallen in love 
and married in the old-fashioned way, without re- 
gard to race or creed, I can claim a membership of 
nearly every one of the national societies. 

First comes the Scotch, whose dinner is made di- 
gestible by the bagpipes and indigestible by haggis, 
and whose glory in literature and philosophy no one 
can dispute. I have enough Scotch blood to know 



7i3 

that a Scotchman keeps the Sabbath and everything 
else he can lay his hands on. Next comes my own 
Dutch Knickerbocker compatriots, who, believing 
that Holland kept alive the spark of civil and re- 
ligious liberty, and happy in the wisdom of their far- 
sighted ancestors, pre-empted the land on Manhattan 
Island. Then the sons of St. Patrick revel in wit and 
eloquence, while the Welshman displays the intellect 
of Gladstone and the obstinacy of an army mule. 

But for real, solid, unmistakable and honest claim- 
ing of all that there is in this country, and much that 
there is in the world, of which the nineteenth century 
can boast and the twentieth century hope for, the 
Yankee takes the palm. Yet no student of American 
history and no American can fail to accord to the 
forefathers nearly everything which their descend- 
ants claim for them. The Homeric epic, the immortal 
poem of Virgil and the Niebelungenlied have inter- 
ested and inspired all the ages, but the simple story 
of the Pilgrim fathers leaving their comfortable 
homes, abandoning their property and risking their 
lives by crossing the ocean and settling in an inhos- 
pitable wilderness, simply for the privilege of wor- 
shiping God according to the dictates of their con- 
science and of enjoying the priceless benefits of civil 
and religious liberty, is far and away nobler, higher 
and more impressive education than all the deeds of 
all the warriors and conquerers in the epics and his- 
tories of the past. 

We draw the line between the Pilgrim and the 
Puritan. The Pilgrims learned valuable lessons dur- 
ing their eleven years in Holland. Dutch hospitality, 
the open doors of the Dutch University, the benefl- 



77 

cence of universal education and the benefits of re- 
ligious tolerance made upon them an indelible im- 
pression. The forty families who in the cabin of the 
Mayflower signed the immortal charter, first in the 
history of nations of the equality of all men before 
the law, did more for liberty and for the upbuilding 
of these United States than the twenty thousand 
Puritans who came after them. The Pilgrims burned 
no witches, banished no human being for conscience 
sake, but lived their godly lives at peace even with 
the Indians. They welcomed and protected all who 
would come to them and share their fortunes. 

But the Puritan forefathers, imbued with the 
spirit of the Old Testament, and feeling little the 
lessons of the New, were very different persons. For 
seventy years they would not permit a lawyer in 
their colonies, which, perhaps, was not an unmixed 
evil, but the clergy wanted to make and execute the 
laws. They created a theocratic government. We 
find many of their peculiarities in our own time. 
They were the progenitors of the political leader 
whom we sometimes designate as the " boss." They 
believed in liberty, but only for those who agreed 
with them. They believed in free speech, but only 
for those who preached as they taught and from 
their texts. They treated summarily the mugwumps 
of their day. They flogged them and bored their ears. 
The mugwumps were the Quakers, whom they pun- 
ished, and the Hutchinsons, whom they expelled. 
The leader of independent thought and independent 
action in the church, which was then the political 
party, was Roger Williams. He found that there 
was no place for an independent politician in the 



78 

Puritan theocracy, and so he set up, on Narragansett 
bay, a republic of absolute tolerance in religion and 
freedom of thought and expression. Old Cotton 
Mather, the imperious leader or Puritan " boss," de- 
nounced Williams' settlement as the home of every- 
thing that was vicious, revolutionary and criminal 
in religion and politics. To quote his own words, 
" Rhode Island is occupied by Antinomians, Ana- 
baptists, Quakers, Ranters and everything else but 
Christians,the receptacle of the convicts of Jerusalem 
and the outcasts of the land." Ammunition was 
scarce and dear, and so the Puritans passed laws 
punishing any who wasted it by unnecessary fusi- 
lades, except the gun was directed against wolves or 
Indians — there was no close season for shooting 
Indians. 

But the grand merit of these bigots was that they 
could both suffer for conscience' sake and could 
learn the lesson of experience. They evoluted into 
the most liberal conditions and hosx3itable and en- 
lightened charity for the opinions of others, not by the 
clash of arms, but by open-mindedness. They were 
wedded to church and state, but they separated the 
church from the state when they saw the union was 
not consistent with religious liberty. They recognized 
that all government is based upon the consent of the 
governed, and, above all, they built their republic, 
not upon the masses, but upon the individual. Their 
high thinking has carried them so far that wherever 
there is a Yankee there is a church and a creed as 
individual as himself. They practiced slavery, and 
yet the Puritan Lovejoy and the Puritan John Brown 



79 

could, in after years, with the unanimous approval 
of the Puritans, die for the freedom of the slave. 

Whenever there has been a great crisis in our his- 
tory, the leaders of beneficent revolution have been 
the ever-expanding descendants from the Puritan 
stock. It was Sherman, of the Connecticut Sher- 
mans, of whom I am glad to be one, who made the 
brilliant march to the sea. It was Grant of the 
Massachusetts Grants, who was not only the great 
commander, but the patriot and statesman in the 
hour of victory. And it was a Lincoln from the 
Lincolns of New England who signed the Emanci- 
pation Proclamation, 

Stephen A. Douglas once said that New England 
was a great place to emigrate from. The roving 
peculiarity of the Puritan and his descendants has 
been the salvation of the United States. They have 
gone into our new territories, and with their inher- 
ited talent as state builders, they have erected com- 
monwealths which now form, from the West and the 
Northwest and the Pacific slope, the strength, the 
glory and the hope of our country. Though always 
outnumbered, they have impressed their individual- 
ity upon the institutions of all these States; they 
have carried everywhere the church and the school- 
house. 

Religion and universal education have been their 
methods of solving popular discontent and pro- 
moting popular prosperity and happiness. They 
have believed and demonstrated the truth of their 
faith, that a home is not territorial and ancestral, 
but is the spot where the man has worked out his 
own problems in life, and, in working them out, has 



80 

promoted the best interests of the family, of the com- 
munity, of the State and of the country. They have 
kept alive their Puritan traditions by journeying 
occasionally on Thanksgiving day to the old home- 
stead, to impair their digestions with many kinds 
of New England pie, and strengthen their faith by 
a new baptism of New England " pie-ty." While few 
of them stay in Boston, and while they have given 
it over to the Irish, yet, as between Heaven and Bos- 
ton, they give the odds to Boston. Saint Peter re- 
marked to the Yankee who was criticising the pearly 
gates and the golden streets, " You must remember 
that this is not Boston — only Heaven." I met the 
other day a type of the Silas Lapham, of Howell's 
delightful story, who said that, having made a for- 
tune and settled on the Back bay, he had made up 
his mind to repair the deficiencies of early education, 
and had just completed the reading of Shakespeare. 
I asked him what was his opinion of the great drama- 
tist. " Very high," said he, " I do not believe there 
are more than ten men in Boston who could have 
written that book! " 

The world moves in circles, and what has been will 
be. The Puritan ministers, when they governed, ad- 
mitted nobody to a share in the government, except 
its supporters. So, after nearly three hundred years, 
we find the sons of the Puritan missionaries in 
Hawaii following an ancestral precept, and admit- 
ting nobody to share in their government, except 
those who will support them. 

The Puritans, after testing different standards of 
finance, argued themselves into the belief that per- 
manent prosperity could only be had by a single 



81 

standard, and one which could not be disturbed. To 
maintain this standard they borrowed money in 
England at fifty per cent, interest, so poor was their 
credit, or so deficient their financier. Captain Miles 
Standish. They, however, were willing to assist 
their neighbors who differed from them in opinion. 
When they found that the currency of the Indians 
was wampum, they established wampum factories, 
and, sending their agents among the tribes, they 
gathered the valuable furs and pelts, and bought the 
Indian's land. The Indian financier, richer than ever 
in the amount of the currency which was in circula- 
tion, woke up one day to the rude realization that his 
property was gone and for it he had money which 
had lost its value. Governor Kieft, the Dutch Gov- 
ernor of New Amsterdam, finding coin scarce, and 
having no mint, nor silver mines, nor paper mills, 
decreed that a certain shell should become the cur- 
rency of New York. The intelligent Puritan, always 
anxious to aid his neighbor, immediately explored the 
sea coasts of New England for this shell, found it in 
enormous quantities, polished it up and made it 
better looking than that which the New Amsterdam 
treasury had put in circulation; and with that cur- 
rency the Yankee bought most of the old silver and 
large quantities of the old furniture which the frugal 
Dutchmen had brought from Holland. Much of the 
Mayflower furniture, now found in every New Eng- 
land family, was the result of this assistance in their 
finances rendered by the Yankees of the sixteenth 
century to the Dutchmen of the same century on 
Manhattan Island. New York's reputation as the 
6 



'82. 

center of the gold-bug conspiracy is due to the fact 
that it still has a lively memory of its once having 
lost its property and held the shells. 

Plymouth Rock is now only a portable stone, in- 
closed in the park in the old village for the reverence 
of every one; but there is no part of the United States 
where we cannot find Plymouth Rock hens and Ply- 
mouth Rock pants. 

Every age has its problems. Pastor Robinson 
planted the dynamite of truth in the Pilgrim mind 
when, in his farewell sermon, he said that God had 
not yet revealed the whole of His truth to any man. 
With the close of the nineteenth century there has 
come a change in American conditions as radical as 
that brought about by the Revolutionary War. The 
Pilgrim enacted his charter in the cabin of the May- 
flower to establish a government in the new world. 

The Revolutionary War w^as fought that the peo- 
ple of the new world might govern themselves and 
be free, not only from European dictation, but also 
from all European entanglements or political asso- 
ciations. The young Republic welcomed the immi- 
grant, because it intended to make of him and his, 
American citizens, because it meant to utilize the 
brains and the moral and physical power of the new- 
comers for the development within itself of the 
American Republic. The farewell address of George 
Washington was imbued with the spirit of America 
for Americans. The revenue policy of Alexander 
Hamilton, which was concurred in by all the early 
patriots, w^as for the purpose of utilizing and pro- 
moting American resources and American Indus- 



83 

tries, and for the absolute industrial independence of 
the United States of all other countries. 

The legislation of a hundred years had been purely 
internal. We have built our steamboats, dug our 
canals, constructed our railroads, strung the wires 
upon our telegraph poles for American commerce 
between the States and for the American factory 
and the American farm to supplement and support 
each other. Our limitless resources, our exhaustless 
wealth of coal and iron and wood, our vast capacity 
in gold and silver and our inventive genius brought 
about the era of overproduction and exceeding cheap- 
ness. Our population became restive and our politi- 
cians warlike. It has been the device of kings from 
time immemorial to allay popular discontent and 
give employment to the idle by provoking wars. 
That is not the way in which Republics should work 
out their destiny or promote the happiness of the 
people. We all saw, in the unrest of the country and 
in the despair of the unemployed and of the people 
of small means and small business the rapidly clos- 
ing conditions for the eager seeking or acceptance 
of war. A change has come almost in a night. That 
change will make the United States of the twentieth 
century stand for peace. The wildest dreamer of 
even five years ago would not have predicted that the 
products of our factories and mills could compete in 
their own markets with the manufactures of the old 
world. But the carpets of Yonkers are being sold at 
Kidderminster, the rails of Pittsburg are being laid 
down in Liverpool, and the great bridge which Hol- 
land is to build over one of its inland seas was cap- 



84 

tured by an American iron firm against all European 
competition as to price, though denied the Americans 
from patriotic motives. 

The alarm over the competition of American goods 
has been sounded in the Austrian and German Par- 
liaments by their farsighted statesmen. It is seen 
in the hasty legislation of France. Its restiveness is 
felt in the public opinion of Great Britain. Our 
democracy produces a skill and ambition in our ar- 
tisans by which they do more and better work in 
eight hours than their European competitors in ten. 
Our coal and iron are cheaper at the factory and at 
the furnace by far than the coal and iron of the old 
world at their factories and furnaces. Our inventive 
genius is constantly evolving better and more eco- 
nomical methods of production, and the machine of 
to-day is cast aside at once by the enterprising 
Yankee for the better one of to-morrow, while his 
European rival clings to the old machine until it is 
worn out. Our low rates for transportation, which 
are one-quarter those of European countries, have 
annihilated space. They have brought our cheaper 
raw material alongside our improved methods and 
our more intelligent artisans, and are carrying the 
product to our seaboard and the markets of the 
world. '■ 

For the twentieth century the mission of the 
United States is peace; peace, that it may capture 
the markets of the world; peace, that it may find the 
places where its surplus products, not only of food, 
but of labor, can meet with a profitable return. 

President McKinley has struck the keynote of this 
expanding policy of our country, and recognized that 



85 

our mission has changed from purely internal devel- 
opment to foreign commerce, in the note which he 
has sounded so loudly and so clearly for peace. 

Thus the twentieth century will reverse the nine- 
teenth and the eighteenth, the seventeenth and the 
sixteenth, and the United States will enter hopefully 
upon its larger mission. 



speech upon taking the Chair as President ; 

of the Republican Club of The City of \ 

New York, January 17, 1898. j 



Gentlernen : 

I have assumed the gavel many times in the course 
of a checkered and rather agreeable career, but 
never with more pleasure than to-night. It is an 
honor for any of its members to be elected the presi- 
dent of the Republican Club. The conditions attend- 
ant upon this annual meeting make the elevation to 
the position one of peculiar significance and gratifi- 
cation. 

The differences in our party are more acute and in- 
tense than they have been for a quarter of a century. 
They found expression at the polls in the last elec- 
tion, and are rapidly culminating in hostile organi- 
zations. The Republicans of New York are not 
alone in these troubles. They are found in Ohio, in 
Maryland and in other States. All these warring 
elements are conspicuously and ably represented in 
our club. That they should have united and unani- 
mously elected me president is at once a distinction 
and imposes a great responsibility. It is full of 
pleasant suggestions and prophetic promise of hap- 
pier times for the future. It demonstrates that Re- 
publicans can get together, and when the crisis be- 
comes sufficiently marked they will discover some 
method of party unity and party harmony. Happily 
these differences are not upon National principles, 



88 

policies or measures. In the present, as in the past, 
upon the commercial seaboard of the Atlantic and on 
the golden coast of the Pacific, amid the tropical pro- 
ductions of the South and the industrial efforts of 
the North, in the harvest fields of the West and the 
workshops of the East, the Eepublican party is 
agreed and enthusiastic for the principles which 
have made our country great and our party one of 
the most memorable of political parties in the his- 
torj of free governments. 

The growth of clubs is one of the most remarkable 
things of our time. The gregarious tendency of 
modern populations has developed this form of asso- 
ciation in every considerable city in the world. For 
generations the principal object of the club was 
social. But in our time it has come to be the gather- 
ing-place of people who have like views and like in- 
terests. The political and religious club is rapidly 
sapping the foundations and the prosperity of the 
purely social organizations. Within the walls of 
their own club-houses men who are interested in the 
advocacy of political principles or the preservation 
of religious dogmas can find in our busy life the way 
to meet, to discuss and promote the things in which 
they believe. The power and the influence of the 
club which is both political and social have not yet 
been fully felt in our country. It is a potential force 
in the governments of the Old World. 

Everything has changed since the formation of 
our government. The fathers of the Republic i)laced 
the capital at Washington because they feared the 
influence of great cities. The lessons of the French 
Revolution had given them a terror of mobs. They 



89 

souglit to place the capital where the population 
would be purely official, and where Congress could 
not be intimidated or overawed by a turbulent popu- 
lace. We now see their short-sightedness. Washing- 
ton, Jefferson, Adams and Madison were farmers, as 
w^ere most of the leaders of the Eevolution and fram- 
ers of the government. Hamilton and Jay, though 
lawyers, loved the country and its life, and were in 
harmony with rural ideas and prejudices. The coun- 
try press were the moulders of public opinion. Now 
the city daily newspaper penetrates every farmhouse 
and is on the desk of every member of Congress. This 
constant concentration of popular-ion and gregarious 
madness is the most difficult problem of our time. It 
weakens that strength of the individual which has 
been the power in our institutions and their develop- 
ment. It is to be lamented, but can not be helped, 
and must be wisely met. As everything in our day is 
drawn to cities, the great parties of the country 
must be strongly and intelligently represented in 
them. That government is more electrically in touch 
with the public sentiment of the country which has 
its legislative halls in the real capital of the Eepub- 
lic. Washington or Albany will often be moved by 
excitements created within the walls of the State 
House, and not felt outside. They are like kettles, 
which steam and snort and blow and throw off 
steam, but the fire is only under the kettle. If both 
our own Legislature and the National Congress were 
in New York, they would feel instantly along the 
wires which come from every centre, every locality 
and every interest to the metropolis the wants, the 
impulses and the judgment of the country. More 



90 

and more as the years roll by will Cabinet Ministers, 
Senators and Congressmen gather in New York. 
More and more will the strong men of other States 
find their business or their pleasure, at certain sea- 
sons of the year, in this great city. 

The two curses of power are flattery and isolation. 
They prevent access to the great official or leader 
and thej make his mind inhospitable to advice or 
suggestions other than his desires. The easiest tran- 
sition is from finding his wise and honest adviser 
disagreeable to believing him to be his secret enemy. 

Thus the political club must grow in importance 
in our city. Our successful opponents in the recent 
municipal election have already recognized this, and 
the press and the town are ringing with the hun- 
dreds who are admitted every night to the Demo- 
cratic Club and the statesmen from all over the coun- 
try of the Democratic faith who are asking to be en- 
rolled among its members. 

I once had an experience of how isolation affects 
an official. Mayor Havemeyer had managed to get 
at odds with his party, and lived in the exclusive as- 
sociation of his appointees and employes. It was a 
little court of fulsome flatterers and false friends. 
An ordinance had been passed of great interest to 
the New York Central railroad, which he had re- 
fused to sign. I succeeded in entering his office one 
day, and he said to me with great sternness: " I am 
told that whenever you try to get a public official to 
do something you always succeed, because you pre- 
sent the matter in such a way that you persuade him 
against his judgment and his duty, and I did not in- 
tend to see you." 



91 

" Well," I said, " Mr. Mayor, that is very flattering, 
but it would ruin me in my official and professional 
capacity if it was universally believed. Now, I will 
tell you what I will do. I will let you do all the talk- 
ing, and I will not say a word." 

So he immediately began talking about himself, 
his place, his power, and the popularity and the bene- 
fits of his rule. He said, finally : " You see me here 
all alone. Nobody comes in to visit me. There," he 
said (pointing to Broadway), " is that stream of peo- 
ple going up and down — business men, professional 
men and laboring men. They never come here. They 
don't even look over here, because they know the old 
Dutch mayor is taking care of their interests." 

I said : " Mr. Mayor, you have stated your posi- 
tion, your power and the benefits of your official con- 
duct so much more strongly than I could myself that 
I can only accept them as the absolute facts, and as 
one and a representative of those people who pass 
up and down say that is their view." 

He immediately signed the ordinance. 

None of us has yet grasped the full meaning of 
this greater city of New York. The movement of 
people from all parts of the country to cities will be 
immensely accelerated by New York becoming the 
second, and soon the first, city of the world. The at- 
traction of gravitation is resistless. London and 
Paris and Berlin and Eome grow with infinitely 
greater rapidity than any of the other cities of their 
respective countries. New York will advance by 
leaps and bounds, because of the irresistible attrac- 
tion vv^hich crowds have for individuals. New York, 
cosmopolitan and national, is to be not only the com- 



92 

mercial and the financial, but the political, the reli- 
gious, the literary and the intellectual, center of the 
continent. Its greater opportunities for success or 
failure, its instantaneous touch with all the world, 
its concentration and diffusion of news and of busi- 
ness, will bring here not only a permanent popula- 
tion of enormous size, but the resident representa- 
tives of every business, profession and interest in the 
United States. More and more every day the busi- 
ness man of America is coming to understand that 
his highest business is the business of politics. Blow 
after blow from the President or from Congress has 
taught us that from Washington can come in a night 
the paralysis of trade and the stoppage of industries, 
or from Washington can come the legislation which 
will energize and promote the business interests of 
the country. 

These Southern, Western, Pacific Coast, Mountain 
State and New England men in our midst remain in 
close association with their own localities at the 
same time that they are nominally New Yorkers. 
They are open-minded and free from prejudice. 
Their politics are selfish, but it is the selfishness 
which promotes the best interests of the country and 
gives the largest employment to its capital and 
labor. These representative men are largely Repub- 
licans; their home should be a Eepublican club. 
This organization has the age, the experience, the 
membership and the possibilities to make it such a 
home. It should be divorced from everything that is 
petty or small or local or individual. It should have 
no care and no voice in the selection of candidates 
or in the organization politics of the ward or the city 



93 

or the locality. It should welcome upon its rolls 
every Kepublican who is a Republican by profession, 
by faith and by practice on National lines. Our 
Democratic friends are building up a club whose 
avowed object is to have New York city control the 
policy of the Democratic party in the State and in 
the country. Our purpose in this club should be 
broader. It should be to have this club the repre- 
sentative, and the intelligent representative, of the 
Republican opinion of the whole country— Republi- 
can opinion crystalized from the judgment and dis- 
cussion of intelligent Republicans from every part 
of the country. This is a large programme, but it is 
in harmony with that great city which on January 
1st took its place among the mighty municipalities 
of ancient and modern times. 

Our membership should be numbered by the thou- 
sands, should be limited only by the boundaries of 
the Republic of the United States, and our organiza- 
tion should be the home where the Senator, the Con- 
gressman, the business man, the lawyer, the artisan 
and the labor leader from all over the country can 
find hospitality and congenial minds, and our Repub- 
lican Club should be known as the National Republi- 
can Club. 



speech as President of the Republican Club 
: I of The City of New York at the Banquet at 
Delmonico's, Celebrating the Birth- 
day of Abraham Lincoln, 
February 12, il 



Gentlemen : 

For nearly two decades this club has celebrated 
the birthday of Abraham Lincoln. Some of these 
occasions have been memorable for the brilliancy of 
the oratory, the importance of the principles enun- 
ciated, and the discriminating and eloquent tributes 
to the character, life and services of this great pa- 
triot and Republican leader. In some years our 
meetings have been held in the despair of defeat, and 
in others while flushed with victory; but whether 
the political conditions were gloomy or bright, the 
sentiment of the meeting has always been full of 
hope and inspiration. 

The truth and the courage to speak it, no matter 
whom it hurts or where it hits, is the spirit of this 
night. No good cause was every injured, and every 
good cause is always helped by fidelity to the truth. 

When we came together on the 12th of February, 
1892, we were enjoying with all our countrymen the 
unequaled prosperity of that period. The adminis- 
tration of President Benjamin Harrison, one of the 
wisest and ablest of our chief magistrates, had just 
ended, and left behind a glorious legacy. The flood 



96 

of national wealth and employment was at its 
height, and Father Time cut deep in the memorial 
post which records the rising tide — the notch which 
had never been reached before, and never has been 
reached since. A year later the receding tide had 
left the shores littered with the wrecks of business, 
of fortunes and of families; 1894 was still darker, 
and 1895 saw the country in industrial paralysis 
from general distrust. In 1896 the greatest battle of 
the century between the economic forces of the land 
and with the currency theorists had been settled by 
the vote of the people for the Republican principle of 
the protection of American industry, and the Eepub- 
lican and honest Democratic principle of sound 
money. The response of capital and labor to our vic- 
tory is heard in the humming of the spindles and the 
roar of machinery, and is seen in the fires of the fur- 
naces and the factories, and in the employment of 
hundreds of thousands of the unemployed, who are 
now laboring and enjoying the fruits of their labors. 
We have won but half the fight, and yet there is this 
satisfactory result. But the victory can not be per- 
manent, the conditions of prosperity can not be last- 
ing, the factors of credit can not be complete until 
the other principle, the one of honest money, is im- 
pregnably placed upon the statute books of the Re- 
public. The fight is on and must be fought to the 
finish. 

The responsibility of those who believe there can 
be no lasting prosperity until the standard of value 
is fixed and we are placed beyond question in har- 
mony with the commercial nations of the world is 
limited by the boundaries of no single State or group 



97 

of States. When a Senator from this greatest of 
business commonwealths easts one-half of the vote 
of New York for the silves basis we have the same 
duty imposed upon us as rests on the Republicans of 
Kansas or Colorado. It is to agitate, agitate and 
again agitate until our currency is no longer a politi- 
cal question. 

Our motto to-night and for this discussion is the 
maxim of our Great Chief, uttered in sympathy and 
sorrow when pleading with our misguided Southern 
brethren to return to their allegiance to the Union, 
" With malice toward none and with charity for all." 
There is not a Republican leader nor a Democratic 
leader who does not need in this discussion to crawl 
under some corner of the mantle of charity. That 
there has been such an earnest, wide-spread and hon- 
est belief in the free coinage of silver, in other words 
in depreciated and irredeemable currency, is due to 
the teachings of nearly all of our leaders and most of 
our organs of public opinion. The results demon- 
strate that when you compromise with the Devil the 
Devil will get you in the end. A distinguished Sena- 
tor said to me in Washington last week, " I have 
been teaching bimetalism to my constituents for 
years in order to beat fiat money and free silver, and 
never woke up until within a year to the fact that I 
had made a mistake, and was really stimulating the 
heresies against which I was contending." The most 
gigantic and universal system of university teaching 
ever engaged in during a Presidential canvass was 
conducted by the business interests of the country 
during our late Presidential campaign, and after all 
the tremendous effort nearly one-half the people of 
7 



98 

the country voted for the heresy of fiat money. It 
was in our platform, and therefore in fulfillment of 
one of our pledges, that we should try European 
countries to see if there could be international bi- 
metalism. The result, however, of that, and of the 
attitude of our party leaders in Congress and upon 
the stump has been seen in the elections this fall. 
Multitudes of voters, though only partially convinced 
that gold is the true standard of value, cast their bal- 
lots for McKinley and Hobart and sound money, but 
the moment that they saw anywhere any wavering 
on the question they came to the conclusion that, 
after all, the plea for honest money was only a cam- 
paign cry, and that in our heart of hearts we still be- 
lieved that bimetalism was wedded with prosperity. 
History is ever repeating itself. Periods of financial 
and industrial distress breed economic fallacies. 
Millions accept them as measures of relief, as drown- 
ing men grasp at straws. The experience of the past, 
the proof of their repeated trials and failures, the cur- 
rent opinions of the prosperous and solvent commer- 
cial nations of the world are disregarded on the plea 
that our conditions are exceptional. The truth 
stated and reiterated with calmness and courage is 
the cure, and the only one. Palliatives, compro- 
mises and substitutes which partly admit or half- 
heartedly deny financial heresies reveal the weak- 
ness of the advocates and confirm the faith of the 
votaries of irredeemable currency or double or fluc- 
tuating standards of value. It is utterly futile to at- 
tempt to convert the heathen by fooling with the 
fetich. You must smash it. Then he sees that it has 
no divinity. Demetrius of Ephesus understood this 



99 

principle when he raised the riot which drove out 
Paul. He knew that if Paul destroyed Diana the 
business of selling her images was ended. It was 
a frightful and brutal desecration of art which led 
the early Christians to destroy the masterpieces of 
Praxiteles in the Parthenon and at Olympia, but the 
early Christians knew that Paganism in art had as- 
sumed the livery of Heaven and captured the souls 
of men, and only by proving its earthly character 
could the eyes of the darkened soul be opened to the 
light. Our Puritan forefathers, those fearful icono- 
clasts, those enemies of images and pomp and cere- 
monials and vestments and cathedrals, shocked the 
learning, the piety and the culture of generations by 
their ruthless raids upon them all, but they made 
possible that faith which gives to us civil and reli- 
gious liberty. 

Thank Heaven, the clear and superb utterance of 
President McKinley at the Manufacturers' banquet 
two weeks ago, and the impregnable front of the 
Republican members of the House of Representa- 
tives, have cleared the atmosphere. Those two things 
have done much for National credit and Republican 
hope. Now the representative must take one side or 
the other. The " good Lord and good Devil " period 
has passed. There is no room any more for that 
large class of preachers of whom I remember one as 
an illustrious example. The village church had been 
disrupted by a free-thinking lay member, whose in- 
tellectual equipment was too much for the old pas- 
tor, who was more a shepherd of the flock than a 
militant theologian. So the elders called a gentle- 
man who had the reputation of being a popular 



100 

preacher and was famous for smoothing over difflcul- 
ties. Evangelists and infidels gathered to hear him, 
and he said : " My brethren and sisters, I understand 
that some of you believe that there is a God, and 
some of you think that there is no God. The truth 
must be somewhere between the two." 

It has been the gloiy of the Republican party, as 
distinguished from the Democratic party, that its 
principles and its policies were national. The Demo- 
cratic party might be free trade in a free-trade State, 
and protectionist in a protection State, and sound 
money in a sound-money State, and fiat money in a 
fiat-money State, and for free silver in free-silver 
commonwealths, but the Republican, whether of the 
North, or of the South, or of the East or of the West, 
belonged to one party, which stood upon one plat- 
form, and had only one kind of principles for every 
latitude and longitude. I have no patience with the 
now loudly-professed doctrine of expediency. The 
Whig party went to its grave practicing compromise 
and expediency; the Republican party went to de- 
feat in its first great canvass, because it dared not 
proclaim the full truth, nor express the whole of its 
belief. The birth of victory for the Republican party, 
the beginning of its triumphant career, was at 
Springfield, when Abraham Lincoln made the speech 
with which he entered the canvass for Senator 
against Stephen A. Douglass. He submitted his 
speech to the conference of the State leaders, and 
they all said : " Mr. Lincoln, if jou make that speech 
we are doomed to defeat, not only in this contest, 
but in the national election two years hence." Lin- 
coln's reply was: " I would rather go to defeat on a 



101 

declaration of the real principle of our party than 
to win by any compromivse, because, in that defeat 
will be the courage and the education which will 
win us the Presidency two years hence." That im- 
mortal declaration which frightened the timid, 
scared the politicians and nerved the conscience of 
the Nation, was this : ^' A house divided against 
itself can not stand. I believe this government can 
not endure permanently half slave and half free. I 
do not expect the Union to be dissolved, I do not ex- 
pect the house to fall, but I do expect it will cease to 
be divided. It will become all one thing or all the 
other." That declaration made Abraham Lincoln 
President of the United States; that declaration led 
to the Emancipation Proclamation; that declaration 
reunited and recemented the union of the States; 
that declaration has never failed in its spirit to lead 
the Eepublican party to victor}^ 

It is almost an axiom in Washington that the ut- 
terances of McKinley, Gage, Reed and Dingley are 
good principles, but bad politics. But temporary 
success is worse than defeat v/hen it is won upon the 
maxim recently enunciated by Mark Twain that 
" faith is believing what you know is not so." The 
story of a great battle stirs the blood. When the 
war is in progress the news of a victory thrills every 
nerve and fibre, and the victorious general becomes 
a demi-god. There are battles in the representative 
halls of as great moment to the country, requiring 
as much courage and skilled leadership as those 
which move armies and carry on great campaigns 
and win the decisive conflicts of history. There has 
been no more inspiring and no more hopeful spec- 



102 

tacle, no more dramatic picture of the battle in the 
forum than when the silver resolution, which meant, 
as we believe, if successful, disaster to public credit 
and private business, came down from the Senate. 
With the prestige of the most august body in our 
government behind it, its descent upon the House 
was like the charge cf the Old Guard at Waterloo. 
But the Old Guard bit the dust and crumbled to 
pieces upon the impregnable squares of honest 
money led by that greatest parliamentarian of our 
times — Speaker Thomas B. Beed. 

The plain duty of the House of Representatives is 
to pass a sound currency bill. The able and experi- 
enced delegates to the Indianapolis convention have 
furnished an admirable basis for action. As often 
as the Senate rejects it, pass it again. Defeat will 
promote discussion, and in debate will be encouraged 
and revealed an overwhelming popular sentiment 
which will surely succeed. 

Our wreaths to-night crown the statue, and are 
strewn about the monuments of Abraham Lincoln. 
W^e hail his memory dead as his countr3'-men hailed 
him living. We hail him as the man of the i^eople 
illustrating the possibilities of American citizenship. 
We hail him as the great statesman who proved the 
second savior of his country. We hail him as the 
jxenial humorist whose wit and stories will forever 
prevent his being elevated above the plane of our 
common humanity. We love him because his name 
and fame are the inspiration and education, and the 
continuing leadership of the Republican party. 



Address at the Concert given at the Astoria 

Hotel, March 4, 1898, for tlie Benefit of the 

Widows and Orphans of those who 

Perished on the Warship Maine. 



Ladies and Gentlemen : 

I fear a speech will be a false note in the exquisite 
harmony which is to be given by the artists who 
have volunteered their services this evening. But 
the call to participate and introduce the exercises 
of an occasion like this is too imperative to be ques- 
tioned or denied. It is singularly appropriate that 
art in one of its most agreeable forms — music — 
should pay tribute to the memory of the heroes who 
went down with the battleship Maine, and call to- 
gether the audience which contributes to the sup- 
port of the families of those who died. 

The great apostle gave as the virtues, faith, hope 
and charity, and the chief of these is charity. Char- 
ity is broader far than mere helpfulness to those in 
distress. The tragedy which calls us together has 
given it a patriotic, as well as benevolent signifi- 
cance. By the exercise of its spirit the judgment of 
the country is suspended until the facts are ascer- 
tained. By the exercise of its spirit we not only do 
justice to the dead and care for the living, but we be- 
lieve, until the fact shall prove otherwise, that the 
crime, which might be possible, is so unworthy of a 
brave people as to be utterly improbable. 



104 

Notwithstandiug that our strength is upon the 
land and our territory is so vast, we have always had 
a national fondness for the sea. There has been lit- 
tle hitherto in our conditions or our relations with 
the nations of the world to call for the enormous 
naval armaments which they deem necessary for 
their well-being or their safety. But nothing so stirs 
the blood and fires the imagination of Americans as 
a victory upon the wa.ter. The Continental Army of 
the Revolution, the little force which conquered 
Mexico, the deeds of valor of federal and confederate 
soldiers in the Civil War arouse our pride and enthu- 
siasm. There is, hov/ever, an element of romance 
about the battleship upon the ocean which elicits a 
deeper and a keener interest. The factors of land 
warfare are thoroughly understood, but the sailor 
meets not only the usual dangers of battle, but also 
the perils of the deep. His ship is his country, and 
ours. He must keep it afloat, with the flag flying, 
aaainst both the destructive forces of nature and the 
power of the enemies of his country. It is the glory 
of the American Navy that it has never disappointed 
either the hopes or the ambitions of our people. Its 
record is brilliant with victories which keep alive 
the national spirit and promote patriotism. 

Many of us have wandered through the great gal- 
leries of Europe and lingered in the salons where 
upon the walls were pictured the battles and the 
naval engagements which had saved the country or 
increased its power. We have no national gallery; 
we have no salon of battle pictures, but every Ameri- 
can boy has painted for himself Paul Jones sweeping 
the ocean with his little sloop in the Eevolutionary 



105 

War, the frigate " Constitution " — Old Ironsides — 
bearing down all before her and giving for the time 
the sea power to the Amerean Navy, Porter serenely 
sailing through shot and shell past the batteries of 
Vicksburg, and Farragut, lashed to the shrouds, in 
the bay at Mobile, winning new laurels for Ameri- 
can seamen. And our blood moves at the narration 
of the incident as hotly as did that of our fathers in 
the midst of the strife when we read of Commodore 
Perry abandoning to the enemy his helpless ship, 
going in his little boat to another, and with her re- 
conquering his flagship and causing the surrender of 
all the vessels in the enemy's fleet. 

The tragedy of the Maine has its value. Sad as 
are such occurrences, they reveal that idealism has 
not been killed by the materialism of our times. We 
all of us know men who are chips and sawdust. 
Their lives are exhausted in ceaseless efforts to get 
more of that of which they already have more than 
they need. They serve their purpose on the material 
side of the country's growth, but they are not the 
nation. The same spirit which fired the farmer's 
shot at Lexington that echoed around the world, 
which stood behind the breastworks of Bunker Hill, 
which pledged and periled fortune and life in the 
Declaration of Independence, which left office and 
pulpit, and farm and factory, and store and count- 
ing-room to save the Union, animates to-day the 
American people. Let the national honor, or the 
national flag, or the territory of the nation be as- 
sailed and the hot pursuit of money, vv^hich is our 
characteristic, is abandoned, and we are all soldiers 
and sailors. We are apt to believe when peace has 



106 

prevailed long enough for generations to grow to 
maturity who know not war and sacrifices for coun- 
try that the active principle of patriotism which 
gives all for country is paralyzed or dead. Paul 
Revere and his midnight ride, Nathan Hale and his 
youthful sacrifice, the last words of the dying Law- 
rence, " Don't give up the ship," the thousand inci- 
dents where a brigade or a regiment or a company 
or a soldier or a sailor has stood at the post of duty 
and welcomed death to save the day are the history 
of the past, but the marine, standing at his post, un- 
disturbed after the frightful explosion, waiting to 
report and receive orders, presenting arms and salut- 
ing as his captain rushes up on the deck of the Maine, 
is Paul Revere and Nathan Hale and Lawrence and 
all the rest of them alive to-day, as they were alive in 
their day, equal to the emergency in their hour. 

There is nothing so magnificent and awe-inspiring 
as the conservatism of power. It belongs to our 
times; it existed in no other age. Power has been 
the symbol at all periods in the world's history of 
carnage, robbery, lust, murder, and ruthless spolia- 
tion. It has oppressed the weak, it has robbed the 
defenseless, it has enslaved the conquered. We have 
learned to control the power of nature for the benefit 
of man; we have taken the destructive forces of the 
earth, the water, and the air, and harnessed them to 
machinery to stimulate production, create wealth, 
promote prosperity, and extend happiness. The 
United States is the strongest country in the world. 
Its isolation, its defence of three thousand miles of 
ocean, its ten millions of available soldiers, its vigor- 
ous youth, its martial spirit, and its exhaustless 



107 

wealth and resources, make the Republic the ideal 
expression of power. It is a power that has been 
created by peace and civilization. It is a power con- 
trolled by intelligence, patriotism, and Christianity. 
It is a power whose prestige and influence are used 
not to oppress, attack or absorb its weaker neigh- 
bors, but to protect them against encroachments 
upon their territory or sovereignty by the govern- 
ments of Europe. 

The majesty of civilized power was never better il- 
lustrated than in the attitude of the United States 
in the present crisis. This nation may be easily 
moved to passionate excitement; it may rise to great 
heights of intensity and enthusiasm, but the greater 
the peril the nobler its calm. Captain Sigsbee, barely 
extracting himself from the perils of the explosion 
and the ruins of his ship, had every incentive for 
harsh language and passionate accusation, but, like 
the true American sailor that he is, calmest when the 
danger is greatest, he penned the message to his 
countrymen, " Suspend your judgment until you 
know the facts." President McKinley, feeling be- 
hind him an uprising which threatened to sweep the 
country into war, right or wrong, said to the people: 
" Suspend your judgment until you know the facts." 
And Congress and the people follow with the same 
calmness the investigation and await the verdict of 
the Court of Inquiry. 

Our sympathies are with the Cubans who are 
struggling for liberty, as our sympathies are with 
every people seeking to govern themselves. But 
with sympathy and sorrow and anger the dominant 
emotions of the hour, the confidence of the nation is 



108 

firm in its President, and its judgment is unmoved 
by prejudice or passion. 

One of the most dramatic situations in our history 
was Garfield meeting the maddened mob bent upon 
the murder and the spoliation of every sympathizer 
with the South at the time of the assassination of 
Lincoln, and staying their march and dispersing 
them to their homes with the solemn admonition, 
" God reigns and the Kepublic at Washington still 
lives." That message of Garfield's is our lesson for 
to-day: " God reigns and the Government at Wash- 
ington still lives." That government will protect 
our interests and preserve our honor; that govern- 
ment will find out the right, and, finding out the 
right, will perform it; that government will do what 
is just to Spaniard, to Cuban, and to ourselves. 

God grant that the result of the inquiry will be 
the verdict which we all want, and that is that the 
tragedy of the Maine was not a conspiracy, but an 
accident. It would be a shock not only to us, but to 
the civilized world, if it should prove otherwise. As 
the days roll by and the situation becomes clearer, 
whatever may be our feeling in regard to the strug- 
gle in Cuba, we exonerate a brave nation from the 
crime of assassination. 

The President knows that at his call the people of 
this country stand ready to give him their lives and 
their fortunes. There is no limit to the men, no 
limit to the money that are at his command if men 
and money should be deemed necessary for the na- 
tional defense and the national honor. Our duty as 
plain citizens is performed for the present in sending 
to him this message on the one hand, and, on the 



109 

other hand, as we do here to-night, in paying sweet 
and loving tribute to the memory of the men who 
went down with the Maine — because they were there 
to fight our battles if need be — and in contributing 
as we may to make comfortable those whom they 
loved and left behind among us. 



Speecli as President of tlie Empire State Society 
of the Sons of the American Revolution, at 
the Annual Banquet on the Anniversary 
of the Fall of Lord North's Min- 
istry, March 19, 1898. 



Gentlemen : 

Our annual meeting always commemorates a sig- 
nificant event in American history. It revives recol- 
lections which inspire patriotism and opens wide 
fields both for research and speculation. To-night 
we follow the line in recalling the anniversary of a 
crisis in the history of Great Britain which was of 
momentous consequence to the United States, to 
England and mankind. 

There has been much carping criticism of late upon 
all societies whose membership requires ancestry. 
When ever the press assails with ridicule or invec- 
tive a principle, a man, a cause or an organization, 
there is some good reason for it. The only objection 
to the marksmanship of the newspapers is that it 
does not always discriminate and shoots into the 
crowd. There are societies and societies for the cul- 
tivation of the past in its relations to the present. 
When Americans claim to trace their lineage back 
to the early kings of Europe or to be the lineal de- 
scendants of the Barons of Runnymede, the world 
laughs and the satirist and the caricaturist have a 
happy time. There are said to be sixty thousand 



112 

titles in France, of which only six thousand are 
known to be genuine, while the others run the whole 
range from doubt to deceit. In Russia, where every 
member of the family and the family's family have 
titles, there are reported to be thirty thousand 
Prince Gallatzins. It is a source of honest pride, 
however, to an American when his ancestors for 
many generations in this country have done their 
part as self-supporting citizens in their several 
periods for their neighborhood, their colony, their 
State and their country. It is a gratification to 
know that none of them were hanged, or in jail or in 
the poorhouse. It is a great gratification to know 
that at the birth of the republic, or in the period of 
its peril, they contributed to the creation of this gov- 
ernment of the United States and the independence 
of America. We have none but the kindliest feeling 
toward those of our fellow-citizens who arrived in 
this country too late to participate in these great 
events. Their ancestors were in Europe at the same 
time that our ancestors had the foresight and cour- 
age to cross the ocean in insecure and insignificant 
craft, and the foresight and wisdom to create the 
conditions which their descendants have enjoyed for 
centuries. The later comer who finds in the second 
greatest city in the world the handicap to employ- 
ment and opportunity which comes from the com- 
petition of crowding populations, should not blame 
us because we discovered the possibilities and the 
future of New York when the whole island of Man- 
hattan could be bought for twenty-four dollars. 

The Sons of the American Revolution have alone 
done much to rescue from oblivion, by tablet and 



lis 



monument, places which will increase in interest as 
the centuries roll by. 

In 1732 two boys were born who were destined to 
influence beyond any other men of their period and 
almost of any period, the history of the world and 
the happiness of the human race. One had all the 
advantages that birth, rank, education and position 
could give him in Great Britain, and the other had 
the same opportunities in the New World. One, by 
education, habits of mind and association, embodied 
the spirit of the past; the other the awakened spirit 
of the age. The one was Lord North, the other 
George Washington. Lord North was a believer in 
the autocratic authority of the middle ages. He be- 
lieved in the divine right of kings and in the concen- 
tration of all power in the throne. He never under- 
stood the people nor could he comprehend that they 
had any rights in the administration of government. 
He was a Tory of the Tories and a Bourbon of the 
Bourbons. His great ability and high character only 
gave him a larger place and opportunity for the en- 
forcement of his ideas and the misleading of his 
king. Washington breathed the air of freedom in 
the fields and the forests of the New World. On the 
farm, at the hustings, in the Legislature, in politics 
and in war, he mingled with the people. He early 
learned their intelligence and capacity for self-gov- 
ernment. The lesson of civil and religious liberty 
was taught him by example and precept until, far 
beyond his years or his contemporaries, he knew the 
meaning of liberty and law. In the ordering of the 
great events of the period, Lord North, the most 
hidebound of conservatives, became the most dan- 
8 



114 



geroiis of revolutionists, while Washington, the 
leader of the Revolution, became the embodiment of 
conservatism. Lord North, by enforcing the edicts 
of arbitrary power, created a revolt which lost to 
the British crown the greater part of its colonial 
possessions, inaugurated the era of political expan- 
sion and created the democracy which drove him 
from power and ultimately elevated to the control of 
the destinies of his country the masses of his coun- 
trymen whom he so distrusted and despised. Wash- 
ington guided a revolt against authority, govern- 
ment and law so wisely, so conservatively and with 
such fairness that upon the ruins of the government 
which he destroyed and of the laws which he defied 
he built a republic with the rights of life, of liberty, 
of happiness and of property so embedded in its 
constitution that the institutions of the United 
States alone of all the nations of Christendom have 
survived the shock of the social and political evolu- 
tions of the nineteenth century. 

After one hundred years. Lord North is remem- 
bered only because his ashes fertilize free institu- 
tions. After one hundred years Washington is re- 
vered as the founder of the most beneficent govern- 
ment the world has ever known, and as the foremost 
man in all the elements of patriotism, heroism and 
statecraft of his own time and of every age. i Lord 
North, deserted by his king, his party and his friends, 
passed his declining years lamenting, not his blind- 
ness from the loss of sight, but his blindness in not 
seeing the tendencies of the time and the rising 
spirit of English and American liberty. Washing- 
ton passed his declining years possessing the love 



115 

and the gratitude of his country and the admiration 
of the world. 

There was another young man, contemporary with 
Washington and Lord North, who had so thoroughly 
imbibed the teachings and the spirit of Chatham and 
Burke and Fox that he remained out of power dur- 
ing the whole of the Revolutionary War because he 
believed the Americans were right. His first act on 
coming into the cabinet on the fall of the ministry 
of Lord North was to recognize the independence of 
the United States and make the Jay treaty of alli- 
ance between the two countries — that great treaty 
of peace and arbitration between these two English- 
speaking peoples, the spirit of which grows stronger 
and more beneficent year by year, and never was so 
strong as it is to-day. This statesman was the Earl 
of Shelburne. He had the greatest affection and 
friendship for Benjamin Franklin, the closest rela- 
tions with John Jay and a reverential admiration for 
George Washington. At his request Washington sat 
for a full-length portrait of himself. Five years ago 
that portrait appeared for sale one morning in the 
gallery of Agnew, the Bond street picture dealer. 
Before night it was the property of another British 
statesman, v/ho has enjoyed a great career, and is 
destined to a greater one, who knows the United 
States better than any other Englishman living, and 
whose friendship for America and Americans is ever 
most cordial and sympathetic. That statesman is 
the Liberal leader, Lord Roseberry. This portrait of 
Washington, the best one of him I have ever seen, 
occupying the place of honor in the home of Rose- 
berry, is really a pictorial monument of the fall of 



116 

the North ministry, of the recognition of American 
independence, of the birth and marvelous growth 
from the American Revolution of liberal ideas in 
Great Britain and in Europe. It has also its lesson 
for to-day. One power alone in Europe sympathized 
with Lord North and George III in their attack upon 
the rights of the American people, one power alone 
in Europe held off till the last — until long after 
Great Britain herself had acted — in the recognition 
of the independence of the United States. That 
power was Spain. She had at that time the most 
magnificent of colonial empires, she possessed nearly 
one-half, and the most productive half, of the conti- 
nent of North America, the whole of the Isthmus of 
Darien, the whole of South America, and nearly all 
the islands of the adjoining seas. She feared that 
the example of the American Revolution would 
spread to her own colonies. Had she learned the les- 
son of the American Revolution she might still have 
been an imperial power. That lesson in colonial em- 
pire was home rule and self-government for the peo- 
ple of the colonies and the working out of their own 
destinies according to the conditions of the country 
in which they lived and had their surroundings. 
This lesson cost Great Britain the fairest of her pos- 
sessions, but by adopting the policy which it taught 
her colonies now encircle the globe. It was one of 
the sights of the century to see in the jubilee proces- 
sion last summer the representatives of every conti- 
nent and climate of the earth, of every race and reli- 
gion, loyally following the Queen as subject to her 
authority in an imperial sense, and sovereign them- 
selves in their own home governments. Spain has 



L 



RBons 



117 

persistently clung to the ideas of Lord North, and 
worse than that, to the Eoman pro-consular system, 
which recognized prosperous colonies only as oppor- 
tunities for the rapacity of imperial rulers. The 
spirit of the age has broken her power, has wrested 
from her her marvelous possessions and has reduced 
the empire of a quarter of the globe to a few fertile 
islands in the Atlantic and the Pacific. Too late she 
recognizes, when all is lost in Cuba, the folly of her 
past and of her present. With the independence of 
Cuba will disappear from the face of the earth the 
last remnant of that kind of power which was repre- 
sented by Lord North and which fell with his 
ministry. 



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